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Found these Yakumo white storm scenes and thought I’d share! It’s not great quality but beggars can’t be choosers 🥴 Yakumo cocoa liqueur, Room 2 prt 1 #NUcarnival #NU카니발 #NUカーニバル #新世界狂歡 #ssr #eiden #yakumo #whitestorm

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Olive

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222,297 просмотров • 3 лет назад •via X (Twitter)

NSFW#NUcarnival#NU카니발#NUカーニバル#新世界狂歡#ssr#eiden#yakumo#whitestorm
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Warren Buffett on the Benjamin Franklin thought exercise anyone can use to be successful Warren Buffett offers the following advice to the students at the Terry College of Business: “Pretend I’ve made you a great offer: You can pick any one of your classmates and you get 10% of their earnings for the rest of their lives. What goes through your mind in determining who you would pick?” He continues: “You probably wouldn’t pick the person who gets the highest grades in the class. There’s nothing wrong with getting the highest grades, but that’s not going to be the quality that sets apart a big winner from the rest of the pack… I think you’ll find that it gets down to a bunch of qualities that, interestingly enough, are self-made… It’s integrity, it’s honesty, it’s generosity, it’s being willing to do more than your share.” Then he asks the class to pick a classmate to sell short: “Who do you think is going to do the worst in the class? It isn’t the person with the lowest grades, or anything of the sort. It’s the person who just doesn’t shape up in the character department.” When Berkshire Hathaway hires people, they look for three things: 1. Intelligence 2. Initiative or Energy 3. Integrity Buffett explains: “If they don’t have the latter, the first two will kill you. If you’re going to hire somebody without integrity, you want them lazy and dumb. You don’t want them smart and energetic.” Importantly, he points out that these are habit patterns: “The person who always claims credit for things they didn’t do, cuts corners, and who you can’t count on — in the end, those are habit patterns. And the time to form the right habits is when you’re your age… Someone once said that the chains of habit are too light to be felt until they’re too heavy to be broken. And I see that all the time.” Buffett concludes: “When you write down the habits of that person you’d like to buy 10% of, look at that list and ask yourself, ‘Is there anything on that list that I couldn’t do?’ And the answer is that there won’t be. And when you look at the person you sell short and you look at the qualities you don’t like — if you see any of those in yourself (egotism, selfishness), you can get rid of that. That is not ordained.” This is an exercise that Benjamin Franklin did, as well as Warren Buffett’s old boss: “Ben Graham looked around and said, ‘Who do I admire?’ He wanted to be admired himself, and he asked why he admired these other people. Then he said, ‘If I admire them for these reasons, maybe other people will admire me if I behave in a similar manner.’ And he decided what kind of a person he wanted to be.” Video source: UGA (2001)
4:52

Warren Buffett on the Benjamin Franklin thought exercise anyone can use to be successful Warren Buffett offers the following advice to the students at the Terry College of Business: “Pretend I’ve made you a great offer: You can pick any one of your classmates and you get 10% of their earnings for the rest of their lives. What goes through your mind in determining who you would pick?” He continues: “You probably wouldn’t pick the person who gets the highest grades in the class. There’s nothing wrong with getting the highest grades, but that’s not going to be the quality that sets apart a big winner from the rest of the pack… I think you’ll find that it gets down to a bunch of qualities that, interestingly enough, are self-made… It’s integrity, it’s honesty, it’s generosity, it’s being willing to do more than your share.” Then he asks the class to pick a classmate to sell short: “Who do you think is going to do the worst in the class? It isn’t the person with the lowest grades, or anything of the sort. It’s the person who just doesn’t shape up in the character department.” When Berkshire Hathaway hires people, they look for three things: 1. Intelligence 2. Initiative or Energy 3. Integrity Buffett explains: “If they don’t have the latter, the first two will kill you. If you’re going to hire somebody without integrity, you want them lazy and dumb. You don’t want them smart and energetic.” Importantly, he points out that these are habit patterns: “The person who always claims credit for things they didn’t do, cuts corners, and who you can’t count on — in the end, those are habit patterns. And the time to form the right habits is when you’re your age… Someone once said that the chains of habit are too light to be felt until they’re too heavy to be broken. And I see that all the time.” Buffett concludes: “When you write down the habits of that person you’d like to buy 10% of, look at that list and ask yourself, ‘Is there anything on that list that I couldn’t do?’ And the answer is that there won’t be. And when you look at the person you sell short and you look at the qualities you don’t like — if you see any of those in yourself (egotism, selfishness), you can get rid of that. That is not ordained.” This is an exercise that Benjamin Franklin did, as well as Warren Buffett’s old boss: “Ben Graham looked around and said, ‘Who do I admire?’ He wanted to be admired himself, and he asked why he admired these other people. Then he said, ‘If I admire them for these reasons, maybe other people will admire me if I behave in a similar manner.’ And he decided what kind of a person he wanted to be.” Video source: UGA (2001)

Startup Archive

100,840 просмотров • 7 месяцев назад

My Thoughts on R2 after my time with it! Short review! First, Rivian completely nailed this thing. I love the positioning of the driver seats. That long front nose gives a nice commanding feel. They will sell each and every one of these! Driving impression/suspension: 9/10 I felt the vehicle has good build quality. It felt *tight* and secure. Power delivery was smooth and crisp in all-purpose. Sport mode fella unlocked and ready for all the fun things. Power is rapid and consistent with a full power moment around 35-40mph, all the power is there. There is a good amount of nose rise during a hard acceleration. But I do feel the suspension was working well to control this. Remember this isn’t an air suspension. It’s a coil suspension. There is a difference between the suspension setting soft was SOFT. Firm was stiff but not overly stiff. It didn’t have that bouncing effect that some vehicles can have when going into firm suspension. Moderate was a good balance. I wish it could be more adaptive in moderate but it’s very very good. Turn in was good, and the turning radius was excellent. Switching from D to R for a 3-point turn was smooth and quick, no jerkiness. Very good control over entrance to parking lots. Stable. Lastly, it feels like the small delay some R1 have in throttle is gone with R2. Software: 8/10 This is where you guys know I am hard on them on. Because I want the best they can give. Rivian OS2.0 is a HUGE upgrade over R1. In all cases. Responsiveness, touch input, speed, app switching, keyboard responsiveness, etc., it is a huge difference. I love the new “fish stick” bar. And settings being available with one tap and being app-dependent first is fantastic. Well done Wassym Bensaid, the halo are great. The only thing about them is while driving, it’s hard to get a direct click, especially when trying to use it to switch drive modes where you have to push towards you. The halo likes the spin/move, but I think I just need to get used to it. Living with it would for sure help with that. I’m really hoping they fully unlock customization for them. You can end up with 8 different characters you could adjust. I really like having the driver display. But driving with it, you can notice how much smaller it is compared to R1. It’s no deal breaker, but it’s noticeable. Cameras felt snapper and of higher quality over Gen 2 R1. The turn signal sounds is new I like it as well as the forward and Evers noise it makes. Think Tesla sound when shifting. Audio: Now I’ve experienced R2 3x now. With 2 times with audio. The audio was significantly better than when I got to sit it in, in Miami for a block party. It’s about as good as R1 is now. There did feel like a sub was there. That’s great. I used my Apple Music account so I could listen to the song I love. And it was great. Not perfect but good enough. Long as it’s comparable to R1, it’s okay. Cabin: It was very well appointed. I actually found it sufficiently quiet. 🤫 I think for sure it’s quieter than my R1T without question. The HVAC system design (air vent) I like better than R1. I feel like the HVAC system now can blow the air on better than trying to. I need more time to test preconditioning because that’s where I’ve seen most of the issues with my R1 vehicles. Tons of space, easy to drop the seats, it’s flat, and nice under-floor space. The 1-touch drop for all windows was excellent. Overall: I think this is the Rivian everyone has been waiting for. This will be a fantastic one-car solution for so many families. There is storage for days, off-road abilities a Model Y can’t even think of doing, but the UHF needs to improve quicker than it currently is because that is really becoming a buying decision for people. Tim and I can’t wait to take delivery of our R2 Rivian; we are ready! Feel free to ask me anything about the R2! I’ll do my best to answer it or get you the answer. It’s a 10/10 for so many people.
0:58

My Thoughts on R2 after my time with it! Short review! First, Rivian completely nailed this thing. I love the positioning of the driver seats. That long front nose gives a nice commanding feel. They will sell each and every one of these! Driving impression/suspension: 9/10 I felt the vehicle has good build quality. It felt *tight* and secure. Power delivery was smooth and crisp in all-purpose. Sport mode fella unlocked and ready for all the fun things. Power is rapid and consistent with a full power moment around 35-40mph, all the power is there. There is a good amount of nose rise during a hard acceleration. But I do feel the suspension was working well to control this. Remember this isn’t an air suspension. It’s a coil suspension. There is a difference between the suspension setting soft was SOFT. Firm was stiff but not overly stiff. It didn’t have that bouncing effect that some vehicles can have when going into firm suspension. Moderate was a good balance. I wish it could be more adaptive in moderate but it’s very very good. Turn in was good, and the turning radius was excellent. Switching from D to R for a 3-point turn was smooth and quick, no jerkiness. Very good control over entrance to parking lots. Stable. Lastly, it feels like the small delay some R1 have in throttle is gone with R2. Software: 8/10 This is where you guys know I am hard on them on. Because I want the best they can give. Rivian OS2.0 is a HUGE upgrade over R1. In all cases. Responsiveness, touch input, speed, app switching, keyboard responsiveness, etc., it is a huge difference. I love the new “fish stick” bar. And settings being available with one tap and being app-dependent first is fantastic. Well done Wassym Bensaid, the halo are great. The only thing about them is while driving, it’s hard to get a direct click, especially when trying to use it to switch drive modes where you have to push towards you. The halo likes the spin/move, but I think I just need to get used to it. Living with it would for sure help with that. I’m really hoping they fully unlock customization for them. You can end up with 8 different characters you could adjust. I really like having the driver display. But driving with it, you can notice how much smaller it is compared to R1. It’s no deal breaker, but it’s noticeable. Cameras felt snapper and of higher quality over Gen 2 R1. The turn signal sounds is new I like it as well as the forward and Evers noise it makes. Think Tesla sound when shifting. Audio: Now I’ve experienced R2 3x now. With 2 times with audio. The audio was significantly better than when I got to sit it in, in Miami for a block party. It’s about as good as R1 is now. There did feel like a sub was there. That’s great. I used my Apple Music account so I could listen to the song I love. And it was great. Not perfect but good enough. Long as it’s comparable to R1, it’s okay. Cabin: It was very well appointed. I actually found it sufficiently quiet. 🤫 I think for sure it’s quieter than my R1T without question. The HVAC system design (air vent) I like better than R1. I feel like the HVAC system now can blow the air on better than trying to. I need more time to test preconditioning because that’s where I’ve seen most of the issues with my R1 vehicles. Tons of space, easy to drop the seats, it’s flat, and nice under-floor space. The 1-touch drop for all windows was excellent. Overall: I think this is the Rivian everyone has been waiting for. This will be a fantastic one-car solution for so many families. There is storage for days, off-road abilities a Model Y can’t even think of doing, but the UHF needs to improve quicker than it currently is because that is really becoming a buying decision for people. Tim and I can’t wait to take delivery of our R2 Rivian; we are ready! Feel free to ask me anything about the R2! I’ll do my best to answer it or get you the answer. It’s a 10/10 for so many people.

Tyrone Holland🚀🧑🏽‍💻

32,078 просмотров • 2 месяцев назад

14 Indisputable reasons why the Holocaust COULD NOT have happened. 1) The official International Red Cross report states that 271,301 deaths occurred in all of the so called ‘concentration camps’. 2)The number of dead at Auschwitz was revised in 1989 from 4.1 Million to 1.5 Million. And yet, the ‘official’ number of 6 million somehow remains unchanged. 3) The Fuhrer allowed J*ws to leave Germany and Poland. He allowed them to go elsewhere, so long as it wasn’t within Reich territory. If his intent was truly to erase all J*ws, why would he give them such mercy? 4) American gas chamber expert Dr. Fred Leuchter visited all the sites and testified that the supposed ‘gas chambers’ were incapable of supporting death by gassing. Many other experts in this field of research have backed up this claim. Wooden doors, a lack of ventilation, and other issues make the possibility of mass gas-related executions an impossibility. 5) Auschwitz staff themselves have gone on record to say that much of the present-day museum is not original. It’s been edited and added to in order to fit the false narrative that a genocide occurred there. 6) With supposedly there being 6 million deaths, surely we would be able to find the bodies, right? Except that’s not true. Humans can find remains of species from millions of years ago, but we’re unable to find 6 million bodies from 80 years ago? This cannot be ignored. 7) Actual gas chambers from the time made clear markings on the walls due to their chemical potency. And yet, when forensic examination was conducted at the camps, no evidence of gassings was found in the alleged execution chambers. The one exception to this is with the laundry room, where zyklon B was used to stop the spread of typhus. 8) The obsession with 6 million J*ws dying far predates WW2. In newspapers, media and even some J*wish religious scripture, there is time and time again mention of 6 million deaths. To them, it’s practically a sacred number meant to be fulfilled by a lie rather than truth. For decades before the Reich rose to power, the J*ws were always crying that 6 million of them were dying, when in reality it never happened. It was always a lie. 9) The supposed concentration camps had swimming pools, maternity wards, dining halls, recreation areas, and many more luxuries. This doesn’t fit the false narrative of a genocide, and so the now J*wish owners of Auschwitz and other camps have tried to cover up these areas. 10) Along with covering up aspects that don’t fit their narrative, the J*ws have also added on to the camps to better gain sympathy from the masses. The chimney on Auschwitz was not present in 1945. It was later built by the Soviets, because you can’t have gassings without ventilation. 11) The J*wish population in 1933 was 15,315,000. In 1948, it was 15,753,000. Where is the 6 million drop? It doesn’t exist, because it is false. 12) The truth does not fear investigation, and yet in 18 countries today questioning the holocaust gets you arrested, and in dozens more you are persecuted. Why can’t we ask questions? Why can’t we see evidence beyond biased J*wish testimony? 13) Starting in 1941 and ending in 1945, if you start executing people by gassing in every one of the alleged gas chambers non-stop 24/7, you still will not arrive at the number of 6 million. No matter which way you spin it, no matter how you try to defend the story, 6 million deaths are simply not possible. 14) Top Reich leaders denied the claim that an order to execute all the J*ws ever occurred. Even when the personal belongings and diaries of high-ranking officers were captured, there was nothing detailing an order for a genocide. In the words of the great Bishop Richard Williamson- “All the emotion is on one side; all the evidence is on the other.” This is not opinions. This is not hate. These are facts presented for public education on the topic. Start noticing.
1:07

14 Indisputable reasons why the Holocaust COULD NOT have happened. 1) The official International Red Cross report states that 271,301 deaths occurred in all of the so called ‘concentration camps’. 2)The number of dead at Auschwitz was revised in 1989 from 4.1 Million to 1.5 Million. And yet, the ‘official’ number of 6 million somehow remains unchanged. 3) The Fuhrer allowed J*ws to leave Germany and Poland. He allowed them to go elsewhere, so long as it wasn’t within Reich territory. If his intent was truly to erase all J*ws, why would he give them such mercy? 4) American gas chamber expert Dr. Fred Leuchter visited all the sites and testified that the supposed ‘gas chambers’ were incapable of supporting death by gassing. Many other experts in this field of research have backed up this claim. Wooden doors, a lack of ventilation, and other issues make the possibility of mass gas-related executions an impossibility. 5) Auschwitz staff themselves have gone on record to say that much of the present-day museum is not original. It’s been edited and added to in order to fit the false narrative that a genocide occurred there. 6) With supposedly there being 6 million deaths, surely we would be able to find the bodies, right? Except that’s not true. Humans can find remains of species from millions of years ago, but we’re unable to find 6 million bodies from 80 years ago? This cannot be ignored. 7) Actual gas chambers from the time made clear markings on the walls due to their chemical potency. And yet, when forensic examination was conducted at the camps, no evidence of gassings was found in the alleged execution chambers. The one exception to this is with the laundry room, where zyklon B was used to stop the spread of typhus. 8) The obsession with 6 million J*ws dying far predates WW2. In newspapers, media and even some J*wish religious scripture, there is time and time again mention of 6 million deaths. To them, it’s practically a sacred number meant to be fulfilled by a lie rather than truth. For decades before the Reich rose to power, the J*ws were always crying that 6 million of them were dying, when in reality it never happened. It was always a lie. 9) The supposed concentration camps had swimming pools, maternity wards, dining halls, recreation areas, and many more luxuries. This doesn’t fit the false narrative of a genocide, and so the now J*wish owners of Auschwitz and other camps have tried to cover up these areas. 10) Along with covering up aspects that don’t fit their narrative, the J*ws have also added on to the camps to better gain sympathy from the masses. The chimney on Auschwitz was not present in 1945. It was later built by the Soviets, because you can’t have gassings without ventilation. 11) The J*wish population in 1933 was 15,315,000. In 1948, it was 15,753,000. Where is the 6 million drop? It doesn’t exist, because it is false. 12) The truth does not fear investigation, and yet in 18 countries today questioning the holocaust gets you arrested, and in dozens more you are persecuted. Why can’t we ask questions? Why can’t we see evidence beyond biased J*wish testimony? 13) Starting in 1941 and ending in 1945, if you start executing people by gassing in every one of the alleged gas chambers non-stop 24/7, you still will not arrive at the number of 6 million. No matter which way you spin it, no matter how you try to defend the story, 6 million deaths are simply not possible. 14) Top Reich leaders denied the claim that an order to execute all the J*ws ever occurred. Even when the personal belongings and diaries of high-ranking officers were captured, there was nothing detailing an order for a genocide. In the words of the great Bishop Richard Williamson- “All the emotion is on one side; all the evidence is on the other.” This is not opinions. This is not hate. These are facts presented for public education on the topic. Start noticing.

Donny

25,525 просмотров • 1 месяц назад

The “I never wanted any of this to be public or content” Myth I never wanted any of this to come out. Except I actually mean that. It’s embarrassing, it’s trashy, and it’s the opposite of how I want to present myself publicly. I stayed silent for months while lie after lie was spun about me behind the scenes because I didn’t want to air private, messy moments from a relationship I genuinely cared about. I stayed silent out of fear, because I was told no one would believe me because he would be blindly believed on his large platform. In one of our very last conversations before I blocked him everywhere mid-October, he threatened to do a show on me, contact my employer, and “turn me into the next Lindsey”. Why? Because I didn’t want to continue apologizing to him for the 300th time about venting to someone I thought was a friend. I stayed silent because of these threats. But after Wednesday, after Chelsea posted the private video Aidan gave her, (the same one he threatened me with directly back on 10/2), and after the gaslighting posts yesterday, I don’t have a choice anymore. So here is the timeline. Here are the receipts. Here is what actually happened. September-October 2025- I Stayed Silent Through Months of Smear Campaigns For months, several creators repeated the same false narrative that “Aidan never said a bad word about Meredith.” Jess. Glarer. Auntie Deb. Kim. Ray from Dallas. Others. Meanwhile, Aidan was: • Badmouthing me privately and encouraging others to do so publicly, • Texting Joe “Flipperhead” entire paragraphs trashing me, • Aidan knew Joe would leak them (and even bragged on a stream that he did exactly that so he’d leak them), • Sending Jess Machado after me for months on her large platform, • Directing people behind the scenes to paint me as a villain. • Sending random people who supported me DMs to change their mind (yes Aidan, not everyone is fooled by your bullshit and they came right to me). I ignored all of it. I said nothing. I stayed silent through daily lies because I didn’t want to call more attention to it or face Aidan’s wrath. November 2025 -The Rumors About “March 4”, Joe Flipperhead Flips to Team Aidan Aidan texted Joe his entire made-up version weeks ago. Joe circulated those texts on purpose. Joe threatened me with posting a video montage of mine and Aidan’s private texts. Joe is a pussy so he eventually had Kristy post it for him. Creators discussed it publicly without me ever responding. I STILL didn’t defend myself. November 26-27, 2025- Ratchet Chelsea: The Full 48 Hour Meltdown 11/26/25- The Unprovoked Attack & The March 4 Video On Tuesday night, Chelsea came out of nowhere and launched herself straight at me, accusing me of all kinds of conspiracies from harassment to the horrific crime of sending a friend request, which is explained in vivid detail in the below post (she’s since gone somewhat viral, love this for her!) She spent the next 24 hours thoroughly embarrassing herself and the moment anyone challenged her story even slightly, she did what she always does: she imploded. Her accusations spiraled into her posting the March 4 video. On 11/26/25 at 11:08 PM, Chelsea posted the first clip–a blanket, context-less snippet of me drunk saying something I immediately apologized for the next morning. At 11:50 PM, I responded because at that point, I had no choice. 11/27/25-The Gaslighting & 9-Minute Backpedal Then yesterday, Aidan tried to save face by posting that he “didn’t want the video to be public.” And like clockwork, nine minutes later, Chelsea came charging into the comments like a Temu-sponsored bat out of hell, scrambling to apologize, trying to rewrite reality so it looked like he didn’t send her to do it. It was panicked, sloppy damage control. An amateur quality cover-up attempt that only made it more obvious how coordinated this all was. She wasn’t apologizing because she grew a conscience. She was apologizing because she got caught doing exactly what she’d been primed to do. I wonder if Aidan called her “you should’ve waited at least 20 minutes, dumbass!!!”. Not too bright that Chelsea. I can only imagine the regrets he must have for utilizing someone with the IQ of a pencil to do his dirty work. The Coordination Between Aidan & Chelsea Is Obvious Chelsea had virtually NO followers Wednesday morning. Aidan was one of the first. We’re supposed to believe someone with 150k followers just stumbled on an account that starts posting HIS private messages and HIS private videos? Kk. Aidan commented on her posts that same day, clearly encouraging it. She confirmed in my DMs back on 11/6 that she and Aidan were aligned. And she literally wrote at 4:04 AM that she had “proof,” videos & screenshots she would release if I didn’t “stop calling” her, calls she still hasn’t produced a single shred of proof of. Then yesterday within 9 minutes of his post, she writes: “Sorry for going rogue, Aidan, I hope you don’t hate my guts.” Going rogue? From WHAT? Who gave you the material in the first place? The coordination is obvious to anyone with functioning brain cells. The “I never wanted this public” lie Aidan’s post yesterday claimed he “never wanted this to be public.” If this were true, why did he instruct Chelsea to post it? Why did he share it with Jess Machado to threaten me with for the last month? Why did he share it with Joe Flipperhead, and God knows who else? If he didn’t want it public, he wouldn’t have shared it with anyone, let alone the girl I caught him cheating with. The timeline is clear– Chelsea posted a video at 11:08 pm on Thanksgiving Eve, I responded at 11:50 out of self defense. He leaked first. He escalated first. He weaponized it first. Trying to rewrite that now is gaslighting, pure and simple. He's been lighting matches behind the scenes for months, praying for this to go public. The “Meredith accused him of abuse” narrative is FALSE My actions tell the truth: • I never went to police. • I never filed anything. • I never told anyone he hit me. • I never repeated it. • I apologized the next day. • We stayed together for FOUR more months after that night. • He called me 100+ times some days, even indicating he’d end his life if we broke up. If he believed I was “dangerous,” his actions would have said that. They didn’t. The only reason this is public now is because HE leaked it. Actions > drunk slurred words said because a camera was shoved in my face when I asked him repeatedly to stop filming and to leave. The Wilbur Theatre Rumors—Let’s get petty for a second. This is another topic I’m cringing at discussing but we can thank Aidan for since he shared our sexual messages with Joe Flipperhead. And since some people (Auntie Deb, sweetie, this means you) insist on pushing their Dollar Store fan-fiction about the Wilbur Theatre night, let’s actually walk through what happened, using facts instead of whatever drug-induced hallucinations you’ve been spinning this week. The rumor goes like this- I was “mad at Aidan because we didn’t hook up,” and to “prove” it, they trot out a cherry-picked text where I said I wanted to hook up, he didn’t answer, and the next morning I said I was drunk and sorry. And somehow this has been spun into me being desperate, obsessed, or pining like a background character in a teenage soap opera. Adorable. Wrong, but adorable. Here’s the real plot twist-Aidan and I had already been together literally two days earlier, and shocker-that was initiated by him, not me. I didn’t just “show up at the Wilbur”. He invited me to come to the after party at Encore knowing I had a wedding earlier in the night. I wanted to see my friends there who I actually met to go with. This wasn’t a surprise, it was planned ahead of time. The “I was drunk, sorry” message wasn’t heartbreak. It wasn’t longing. It was me politely tapping the brakes because I didn’t even want to entertain whatever bad path it could lead us back down. And then? He texted me asking about my brother’s wedding, how I am, etc. I ignored him for a full week. Until I had no choice but to speak to him about MereNeill. That silence, from me, is what triggered his latest meltdown. Not mine. His. So no, Auntie Deb, your version isn’t “a different perspective.” It’s just wrong. Like wildly, hilariously, not-even-in-the-ballpark wrong. But sure, keep spinning fanfic if it makes your livestreams feel more exciting. I realize it’s probably been awhile since you’ve had any action since you’ve let yourself go so badly, so you live vicariously through others. Recap For MONTHS I ignored: • the texts he sent Joe to leak • the smear campaign • the creators parroting lies • the behind-the-scenes messages • the insinuations I hacked him and even shared revenge porn • the constant coordinated attacks • the threats of “turning me into the next Lindsey” • his warning that everyone would believe him because of his platform • the threats to contact my employer I didn’t clap back, didn’t retaliate, didn’t respond. But Wednesday, when Chelsea dumped the video he gave her, the same video she threatened weeks ago to drop, AND he posted pretending he didn’t want this all out? That was the line. They chose the nuclear option. Now I’m responding with facts in pure self-defense. Conclusion/Message for Temu Storm This entire mess could have stayed private. I wanted it to stay private. But when someone leaks your private moments, lies about your intentions, weaponizes your past, and coordinates an online attack, you either let the false narrative stand or you defend yourself. I’m choosing to defend myself with receipts, not gossip. With timelines, not “he said.” With evidence, not weaponized drunk clips. And then there’s Aidan’s favorite delusion. The claim that I was ‘working with Karen behind the scenes’ or ‘conspiring with her to get him in trouble for the recording.’ That could not be further from the truth. I didn’t even know he had recorded her until after she already knew about it herself. I wasn’t working with her, plotting with her, or communicating with her about it. She and I have always been friendly, but we didn’t even discuss the recording until it started leaking and Joe Flipperhead went feral on Twitter. Meanwhile, Aidan spent weeks screaming at me, accusing me of being some kind of secret double agent, like he was trying to create the betrayal he was terrified of. Almost a self-fulfilling prophecy. And here’s the reality: in the last few weeks, after he’s gone fully scorched earth on me, I have talked to her, and I support her 100%. The things he’s done to her over the past couple years, and the way he twisted it all for his followers, is the exact same manipulation I lived through. I’m not going into her details because that’s her story to tell… but let’s just say I have a feeling you’ll be hearing it sooner rather than later. And since this week has apparently become “Let’s All Fixate on Meredith Week,” let me address the content-creator sideshow, too. Some of you are strangers, while some I actually considered my friends. It’s shocking but not shocking how quickly you all flip a switch and follow your captain’s orders. Ray from Dallas spent his Sunday foaming at the mouth in a hostile little video about me, all bark, no substance. I saw it. I’m not intimidated. Mostly, I’m embarrassed for you. And your family(ies) will feel the same when your ass is doxxed next week. Can’t wait to tAkE tHaT WaLk with you! Then there’s Will, who’s gone on multiple streams calling me “crazy” and pretending he’s scared of me, despite me being nothing but nice to him. Why? Because he thinks I was the first one to tell Karen he heard the recording, which he absolutely did (unless Aidan is lying about who he played it for, but we know he’s actually telling the truth on this for once). She was informed of it the very next day, which is why she called you and you know this. This was two full days before I was even aware of a call at all. Will, for someone with your track record, maybe sit the “women are dangerous” narrative out. You’re not fooling anyone. I’m staring at 15 pages of police reports and no, it’s not all “things you’ve owned up for in the past”. You know this. Again, I’d take a very large seat here. And then my personal favorite-ex-fake friend Auntie Deb, who decided to spice up his Spaces on Thanksgiving by accusing me of distributing revenge porn with zero evidence, zero screenshots, zero anything. A completely fabricated felony tossed around like it’s gossip hour at the bingo hall. Considering your own professional history, James, I’d hope you of all people would understand how catastrophic false accusations can be, but apparently not. It would be a shame if I were to share the real reason around your separation at the middle school and how you wanted to bring Turtlenoy into it. This is all based on the several witnesses I’ve spoken to. See how that works? You announce things as fact based on something someone told you. I wonder if you’ll have that same enthusiasm when the topic is you. TBD. I’ll wait for that retraction about revenge porn. Ball’s in your court hun. And of course, there’s Jessica Machado, who’s been grinding this axe for months like it’s her full-time personality. Hos long did you cry when Chelsea beat you to the punch with that video? Don’t worry hun, there’s more but she didn’t post it because it’s not great for your fairytale. If you thought the fall-out of Kate’s video was bad, Jessica…stay tuned. I may have been momentarily distracted dealing with the chaos from Temu Chelsea, but there’s an army of your victims out there that are eager and ready for your downfall. The false claim that I shared “revenge porn,” the conspiracy theories, the wild accusations you present as fact, all of it. The 10+ streams you’ve now defamed me on. You’ve been so obsessed with me for so long that you can’t even keep your own narratives straight anymore. I love this so much for you. Let me be crystal clear–I am done being all of your punching bag. You love to spin this narrative that I’m this dangerous person. You’d think you’d lay off from constantly f*cking with me if you truly believed that. I would genuinely love for this nonsense to stop. But that requires ALL of you to stop manufacturing drama, stop lying, and stop weaponizing made-up crimes for clicks. And if they want to keep going? I’ve got plenty of content for many seasons to come.
0:57

The “I never wanted any of this to be public or content” Myth I never wanted any of this to come out. Except I actually mean that. It’s embarrassing, it’s trashy, and it’s the opposite of how I want to present myself publicly. I stayed silent for months while lie after lie was spun about me behind the scenes because I didn’t want to air private, messy moments from a relationship I genuinely cared about. I stayed silent out of fear, because I was told no one would believe me because he would be blindly believed on his large platform. In one of our very last conversations before I blocked him everywhere mid-October, he threatened to do a show on me, contact my employer, and “turn me into the next Lindsey”. Why? Because I didn’t want to continue apologizing to him for the 300th time about venting to someone I thought was a friend. I stayed silent because of these threats. But after Wednesday, after Chelsea posted the private video Aidan gave her, (the same one he threatened me with directly back on 10/2), and after the gaslighting posts yesterday, I don’t have a choice anymore. So here is the timeline. Here are the receipts. Here is what actually happened. September-October 2025- I Stayed Silent Through Months of Smear Campaigns For months, several creators repeated the same false narrative that “Aidan never said a bad word about Meredith.” Jess. Glarer. Auntie Deb. Kim. Ray from Dallas. Others. Meanwhile, Aidan was: • Badmouthing me privately and encouraging others to do so publicly, • Texting Joe “Flipperhead” entire paragraphs trashing me, • Aidan knew Joe would leak them (and even bragged on a stream that he did exactly that so he’d leak them), • Sending Jess Machado after me for months on her large platform, • Directing people behind the scenes to paint me as a villain. • Sending random people who supported me DMs to change their mind (yes Aidan, not everyone is fooled by your bullshit and they came right to me). I ignored all of it. I said nothing. I stayed silent through daily lies because I didn’t want to call more attention to it or face Aidan’s wrath. November 2025 -The Rumors About “March 4”, Joe Flipperhead Flips to Team Aidan Aidan texted Joe his entire made-up version weeks ago. Joe circulated those texts on purpose. Joe threatened me with posting a video montage of mine and Aidan’s private texts. Joe is a pussy so he eventually had Kristy post it for him. Creators discussed it publicly without me ever responding. I STILL didn’t defend myself. November 26-27, 2025- Ratchet Chelsea: The Full 48 Hour Meltdown 11/26/25- The Unprovoked Attack & The March 4 Video On Tuesday night, Chelsea came out of nowhere and launched herself straight at me, accusing me of all kinds of conspiracies from harassment to the horrific crime of sending a friend request, which is explained in vivid detail in the below post (she’s since gone somewhat viral, love this for her!) She spent the next 24 hours thoroughly embarrassing herself and the moment anyone challenged her story even slightly, she did what she always does: she imploded. Her accusations spiraled into her posting the March 4 video. On 11/26/25 at 11:08 PM, Chelsea posted the first clip–a blanket, context-less snippet of me drunk saying something I immediately apologized for the next morning. At 11:50 PM, I responded because at that point, I had no choice. 11/27/25-The Gaslighting & 9-Minute Backpedal Then yesterday, Aidan tried to save face by posting that he “didn’t want the video to be public.” And like clockwork, nine minutes later, Chelsea came charging into the comments like a Temu-sponsored bat out of hell, scrambling to apologize, trying to rewrite reality so it looked like he didn’t send her to do it. It was panicked, sloppy damage control. An amateur quality cover-up attempt that only made it more obvious how coordinated this all was. She wasn’t apologizing because she grew a conscience. She was apologizing because she got caught doing exactly what she’d been primed to do. I wonder if Aidan called her “you should’ve waited at least 20 minutes, dumbass!!!”. Not too bright that Chelsea. I can only imagine the regrets he must have for utilizing someone with the IQ of a pencil to do his dirty work. The Coordination Between Aidan & Chelsea Is Obvious Chelsea had virtually NO followers Wednesday morning. Aidan was one of the first. We’re supposed to believe someone with 150k followers just stumbled on an account that starts posting HIS private messages and HIS private videos? Kk. Aidan commented on her posts that same day, clearly encouraging it. She confirmed in my DMs back on 11/6 that she and Aidan were aligned. And she literally wrote at 4:04 AM that she had “proof,” videos & screenshots she would release if I didn’t “stop calling” her, calls she still hasn’t produced a single shred of proof of. Then yesterday within 9 minutes of his post, she writes: “Sorry for going rogue, Aidan, I hope you don’t hate my guts.” Going rogue? From WHAT? Who gave you the material in the first place? The coordination is obvious to anyone with functioning brain cells. The “I never wanted this public” lie Aidan’s post yesterday claimed he “never wanted this to be public.” If this were true, why did he instruct Chelsea to post it? Why did he share it with Jess Machado to threaten me with for the last month? Why did he share it with Joe Flipperhead, and God knows who else? If he didn’t want it public, he wouldn’t have shared it with anyone, let alone the girl I caught him cheating with. The timeline is clear– Chelsea posted a video at 11:08 pm on Thanksgiving Eve, I responded at 11:50 out of self defense. He leaked first. He escalated first. He weaponized it first. Trying to rewrite that now is gaslighting, pure and simple. He's been lighting matches behind the scenes for months, praying for this to go public. The “Meredith accused him of abuse” narrative is FALSE My actions tell the truth: • I never went to police. • I never filed anything. • I never told anyone he hit me. • I never repeated it. • I apologized the next day. • We stayed together for FOUR more months after that night. • He called me 100+ times some days, even indicating he’d end his life if we broke up. If he believed I was “dangerous,” his actions would have said that. They didn’t. The only reason this is public now is because HE leaked it. Actions > drunk slurred words said because a camera was shoved in my face when I asked him repeatedly to stop filming and to leave. The Wilbur Theatre Rumors—Let’s get petty for a second. This is another topic I’m cringing at discussing but we can thank Aidan for since he shared our sexual messages with Joe Flipperhead. And since some people (Auntie Deb, sweetie, this means you) insist on pushing their Dollar Store fan-fiction about the Wilbur Theatre night, let’s actually walk through what happened, using facts instead of whatever drug-induced hallucinations you’ve been spinning this week. The rumor goes like this- I was “mad at Aidan because we didn’t hook up,” and to “prove” it, they trot out a cherry-picked text where I said I wanted to hook up, he didn’t answer, and the next morning I said I was drunk and sorry. And somehow this has been spun into me being desperate, obsessed, or pining like a background character in a teenage soap opera. Adorable. Wrong, but adorable. Here’s the real plot twist-Aidan and I had already been together literally two days earlier, and shocker-that was initiated by him, not me. I didn’t just “show up at the Wilbur”. He invited me to come to the after party at Encore knowing I had a wedding earlier in the night. I wanted to see my friends there who I actually met to go with. This wasn’t a surprise, it was planned ahead of time. The “I was drunk, sorry” message wasn’t heartbreak. It wasn’t longing. It was me politely tapping the brakes because I didn’t even want to entertain whatever bad path it could lead us back down. And then? He texted me asking about my brother’s wedding, how I am, etc. I ignored him for a full week. Until I had no choice but to speak to him about MereNeill. That silence, from me, is what triggered his latest meltdown. Not mine. His. So no, Auntie Deb, your version isn’t “a different perspective.” It’s just wrong. Like wildly, hilariously, not-even-in-the-ballpark wrong. But sure, keep spinning fanfic if it makes your livestreams feel more exciting. I realize it’s probably been awhile since you’ve had any action since you’ve let yourself go so badly, so you live vicariously through others. Recap For MONTHS I ignored: • the texts he sent Joe to leak • the smear campaign • the creators parroting lies • the behind-the-scenes messages • the insinuations I hacked him and even shared revenge porn • the constant coordinated attacks • the threats of “turning me into the next Lindsey” • his warning that everyone would believe him because of his platform • the threats to contact my employer I didn’t clap back, didn’t retaliate, didn’t respond. But Wednesday, when Chelsea dumped the video he gave her, the same video she threatened weeks ago to drop, AND he posted pretending he didn’t want this all out? That was the line. They chose the nuclear option. Now I’m responding with facts in pure self-defense. Conclusion/Message for Temu Storm This entire mess could have stayed private. I wanted it to stay private. But when someone leaks your private moments, lies about your intentions, weaponizes your past, and coordinates an online attack, you either let the false narrative stand or you defend yourself. I’m choosing to defend myself with receipts, not gossip. With timelines, not “he said.” With evidence, not weaponized drunk clips. And then there’s Aidan’s favorite delusion. The claim that I was ‘working with Karen behind the scenes’ or ‘conspiring with her to get him in trouble for the recording.’ That could not be further from the truth. I didn’t even know he had recorded her until after she already knew about it herself. I wasn’t working with her, plotting with her, or communicating with her about it. She and I have always been friendly, but we didn’t even discuss the recording until it started leaking and Joe Flipperhead went feral on Twitter. Meanwhile, Aidan spent weeks screaming at me, accusing me of being some kind of secret double agent, like he was trying to create the betrayal he was terrified of. Almost a self-fulfilling prophecy. And here’s the reality: in the last few weeks, after he’s gone fully scorched earth on me, I have talked to her, and I support her 100%. The things he’s done to her over the past couple years, and the way he twisted it all for his followers, is the exact same manipulation I lived through. I’m not going into her details because that’s her story to tell… but let’s just say I have a feeling you’ll be hearing it sooner rather than later. And since this week has apparently become “Let’s All Fixate on Meredith Week,” let me address the content-creator sideshow, too. Some of you are strangers, while some I actually considered my friends. It’s shocking but not shocking how quickly you all flip a switch and follow your captain’s orders. Ray from Dallas spent his Sunday foaming at the mouth in a hostile little video about me, all bark, no substance. I saw it. I’m not intimidated. Mostly, I’m embarrassed for you. And your family(ies) will feel the same when your ass is doxxed next week. Can’t wait to tAkE tHaT WaLk with you! Then there’s Will, who’s gone on multiple streams calling me “crazy” and pretending he’s scared of me, despite me being nothing but nice to him. Why? Because he thinks I was the first one to tell Karen he heard the recording, which he absolutely did (unless Aidan is lying about who he played it for, but we know he’s actually telling the truth on this for once). She was informed of it the very next day, which is why she called you and you know this. This was two full days before I was even aware of a call at all. Will, for someone with your track record, maybe sit the “women are dangerous” narrative out. You’re not fooling anyone. I’m staring at 15 pages of police reports and no, it’s not all “things you’ve owned up for in the past”. You know this. Again, I’d take a very large seat here. And then my personal favorite-ex-fake friend Auntie Deb, who decided to spice up his Spaces on Thanksgiving by accusing me of distributing revenge porn with zero evidence, zero screenshots, zero anything. A completely fabricated felony tossed around like it’s gossip hour at the bingo hall. Considering your own professional history, James, I’d hope you of all people would understand how catastrophic false accusations can be, but apparently not. It would be a shame if I were to share the real reason around your separation at the middle school and how you wanted to bring Turtlenoy into it. This is all based on the several witnesses I’ve spoken to. See how that works? You announce things as fact based on something someone told you. I wonder if you’ll have that same enthusiasm when the topic is you. TBD. I’ll wait for that retraction about revenge porn. Ball’s in your court hun. And of course, there’s Jessica Machado, who’s been grinding this axe for months like it’s her full-time personality. Hos long did you cry when Chelsea beat you to the punch with that video? Don’t worry hun, there’s more but she didn’t post it because it’s not great for your fairytale. If you thought the fall-out of Kate’s video was bad, Jessica…stay tuned. I may have been momentarily distracted dealing with the chaos from Temu Chelsea, but there’s an army of your victims out there that are eager and ready for your downfall. The false claim that I shared “revenge porn,” the conspiracy theories, the wild accusations you present as fact, all of it. The 10+ streams you’ve now defamed me on. You’ve been so obsessed with me for so long that you can’t even keep your own narratives straight anymore. I love this so much for you. Let me be crystal clear–I am done being all of your punching bag. You love to spin this narrative that I’m this dangerous person. You’d think you’d lay off from constantly f*cking with me if you truly believed that. I would genuinely love for this nonsense to stop. But that requires ALL of you to stop manufacturing drama, stop lying, and stop weaponizing made-up crimes for clicks. And if they want to keep going? I’ve got plenty of content for many seasons to come.

Meredith O

16,962 просмотров • 9 месяцев назад

Like seemingly everyone on this app I have plenty of opinions about Twitter > X and figure now is a good time to open up a bit about my experience at the company. I tweeted for years into the void for the love of it like many of you, but after selling my startup to Twitter in 2020 I finally got to see it from the inside. Up close it was both amazing and terrible, like so many other companies and things in life. As someone with a maniacal sense of urgency built into me, Twitter often felt siloed and bureaucratic. Dumb power plays, reorgs and team name changes for the sake of someone’s ego were distractions that occurred too regularly. You couldn’t just be a builder — you also needed to be a politician. I was shocked by how old and bespoke the infrastructure was, but there was little will to think beyond quarterly earnings calls because we were all beholden to the masters of mDAU and revenue growth as a public company. It often felt like things were held together with duct tape and glue, and that many people had just accepted that a small product change could take months or quarters to build. Management had become bloated to accommodate career growth and the company culture felt too soft and entitled for my own taste. Healthy debate and criticism was replaced by a default refrain of “no, that can’t be done” or “another team owns that so don’t touch it”. Teams could spend months building a feature and then some last-minute kerfuffle meant it’d get killed for being too risky. Just talking directly to customers could turn into a turf war and create deadlocks between functions. I recall one such episode where a teammate spent a month trying to get clearance to reach out to some creators. He went through 3 layers of management and 6 different functional teams. In the end 4 executives were involved in the approval. It was insanity, and unfortunately I saw several top performers get burnt out and demoralized after exhausting experiences like that. Most people were good at their jobs but it was nearly impossible to fire poor performers — instead they got shuffled around to other teams because few managers had the will or resources to figure out how to get them out. A high performance culture pulls everyone up, but the opposite weighs everyone down. Twitter often felt like a place that kept squandering its own potential, which was sad and frustrating to see. The person who was best at cutting through the BS and inspiring a vision during my tenure was Kayvon Beykpour, but he wasn’t fully empowered to run the company since he wasn’t the CEO. Despite those real issues, I was lucky enough to work with some of the most talented people in the business at Twitter in product, design, engineering, research, legal, BD, trust & safety, marketing, PR and more. Often it was a small cross-functional team of intrinsically motivated people who made the biggest impact by challenging some core assumption. Those teams were very fun to be on but they felt like the exception rather than the rule. The months of waiting for the deal to close in 2022 were particularly slow and painful; it felt like leadership hid behind lawyers and legal language as all answers about the company’s future notoriously included the phrase “fiduciary duty”. Colleagues openly talked about how Twitter was being sold because leadership didn’t have conviction in their own plan or ability to fix longstanding problems. Although I didn’t know much about Elon I was cautiously optimistic – I saw him as the guy who built incredible and enduring companies like Tesla and SpaceX, so perhaps his private ownership could shake things up and breathe new life into the company. My take on what’s happened since then is full of lived nuance. When people ask why I stayed it’s easy to answer: optimism, curiosity, personal growth and money. From the beginning I saw that some changes Elon was going to make were smart and others were stupid, but when I’m on a team I uphold the philosophy of “praise in public and criticize in private”. I was far from a silent wallflower. I shared my opinions openly and pushed back often, both before and after the acquisition. I made peace with the fact that I didn’t have psychological safety at Twitter 2.0 and that meant I could be fired at any moment, and for no reason at all. I watched it happen repeatedly and saw how negatively it impacted team morale. Although I couldn’t change the situation I did my best to shine a light on folks who were doing important work while being an emotionally supportive leader for those who were struggling to adapt to the more brutalist and hardcore culture. In person Elon is oddly charming and he’s genuinely funny. He also has personality quirks like telling the same stories and jokes over and over. The challenge is his personality and demeanor can turn on a dime going from excited to angry. Since it was hard to read what mood he might be in and what his reaction would be to any given thing, people quickly became afraid of being called into meetings or having to share negative news with him. At times it felt like the inner circle was too zealous and fanatical in their unwavering support of everything he said. When individuals encouraged me to be careful about what I said I politely thanked them and said I would not be taking their advice. I had no interest in adding to a culture of fear or walking on eggshells around Elon. Either he would respect me for being real or he could fire me. Either outcome was okay. I quickly learned that product and business decisions were nearly always the result of him following his gut instinct, and he didn’t seem compelled to seek out or rely on a lot of data or expertise to inform it. That was particularly frustrating for me since I believed I had useful institutional knowledge that could help him make better decisions. Instead he'd poll Twitter, ask a friend, or even ask his biographer for product advice. At times it seemed he trusted random feedback more than the people in the room who spent their lives dedicated to tackling the problem at hand. I never figured out why and remain puzzled by it. I don’t think things had to be as difficult or dramatic as they turned out to be but I can’t say I’d bet against Elon or count him out. He’s smart and has enough money to make a lot of mistakes and then course correct when things go awry. As the largest shareholder he can tank the value in the short-term, but eventually he’ll need things to turn around. His focus on speed is incredible and he’s obviously not afraid of blowing things up, but now the real measure will be how it get reconstructed and if enough people want the new everything app he is building. I learned a ton from watching Elon up close – the good, the bad and the ugly. His boldness, passion and storytelling is inspiring, but his lack of process and empathy is painful. Elon has an exceptional talent for tackling hard physics-based problems but products that facilitate human connection and communication require a different type of social-emotional intelligence. Social networks are hard to kill but they’re not immune from death spirals. Only time will tell what the outcome will be but I hope X finds its footing because competition is good for consumers. In the meantime, I have a lot of empathy for the employees who are working tirelessly behind the scenes, the advertisers who want a stable platform to sell their stuff on, and the customers who are experiencing chaotic updates. It’s been a madhouse. Twitter moved at the speed of molasses and suffered from bureaucracy but now X is run by a mercurial leader whose instinct is driven by the unique and undoubtedly weird experience of being the biggest voice on the platform. Many of you know me from the sleeping bag incident where I slept on a conference room floor, so I figure, let’s talk about that too. Going viral was an odd and interesting experience. I was attacked by people on the left and called a billionaire bootlicker, while simultaneously being attacked by people on the right for being a working mom who was demonized as an example of a woman choosing her career over her family. Thankfully I can laugh at myself and I don’t take armchair keyboard ideologues too seriously. Being the main character on the timeline, even for a few minutes, requires a thick skin and a strong sense of self. The real story is pretty simple. I was given a nearly impossible deadline for his first project and as the product lead I would never ask anyone to do anything I wasn’t willing to do myself. So I worked round the clock alongside an amazing team spanning many timezones, and we delivered it on schedule – truly against the odds. It was intense but also fun. Those first few months were wildly crazy but I wanted to be there and I have no regrets. Showing up and giving it your all should, in most cases, be celebrated. Obviously you can’t work at that pace forever but there are moments where bursts are mission critical. I’ve pulled many all-nighters in my career and also when I was a student for something that mattered to me. I don’t regret putting in long hours or being ambitious, and feel proud of how far I’ve come from where I started thanks in part to that type of work ethic. I think of life as a game, and being at Twitter after the acquisition was like playing life at Level 10 on Hard Mode. Since I like taking on difficult challenges I found it interesting and rewarding because I was growing and learning so rapidly. I realize our society today trends toward polarization but when it comes to this app, its owner, and its future, I am neither a fangirl nor a hater — I’m an optimistic pragmatist. This may really irritate the internet but you cannot pigeonhole me into some radical position of either loving or hating every change that’s occurred. I escaped my fundamentalist upbringing and am a free thinker these days. Everyone can be seen as both a hero or a villain, depending on who is telling what angle of the story. Elon doesn’t deserve to be venerated or vilified. He’s a complicated person with an unfathomable amount of financial and geopolitical power which is why humanity needs him to err on the side of goodness, rather than political divisiveness and pettiness. I disagree with many of his decisions and am surprised by his willingness to burn so much down, but with enough money and time, something new & innovative may emerge. I hope it does. Sometimes I get asked about how I felt when I got laid off, and the truth is it was the best gift I’ve ever received. Sure the headlines and punchlines wrote themselves but I was battle hardened by then. I knew that I’d worked in a way where I could walk out with my head held high. I have no bitterness about the Product Management team being dismantled, and it made sense for me to exit as nearly all of the remaining PMs were let go. Going on a sabbatical afterward has been exactly what I needed to decompress and I’m finally feeling rested and relaxed. I’m a creative and a builder, so sooner than later I’ll jump back into a high intensity company but I’m grateful for this season of thinking, reading, traveling and being with people I love. After having time to reflect I believe more than ever that the very best outcomes flow from great leadership that combines the head and the heart. I’d be remiss if I didn’t note that in all of this there is also a cautionary tale for anyone who succeeds at something — which is that the higher you climb, the smaller your world becomes. It’s a strange paradox but the richest and most powerful people are also some of the most isolated. I found myself frequently looking at Elon and seeing a person who seemed quite alone because his time and energy was so purely devoted to work, which is not the model of a life I want to live. Money and fame can create psychological prisons which may worsen mental health conditions. We’ve all seen high profile cases of celebrities who end up with some combination of depression, paranoia, delusions of grandeur, mania and/or erratic behavior. Living in an echo chamber is dangerous and being at the top makes a person even more susceptible to being surrounded by yes people when nearly everyone around you is on the payroll and somehow stands to benefit from being in your orbit. Figuring out how to keep “better angels” around in the form of family, friends, and teammates is critical to staying on the rails and enduring intense ups and downs. Everyone needs to hear hard truths sometimes and if you fire all the people who speak up then the reality distortion field may just turn into a vortex. I was drawn to Twitter because I’m obsessed with the problem of loneliness and connection between people. I find it fascinating & troubling that humans are getting lonelier as we simultaneously create a world that’s both safer and wealthier. I don’t believe that trade-off has to exist, which is why I keep returning to that theme in my personal and professional life. I realize this is too long of a tweet but Twitter was a weird and special place on the internet, and I’m grateful to have played a teeny tiny role in its story and evolution. I’m here for whatever comes next — on this app and in new places. Consumer social is very much alive and at a fascinating juncture, so I’ll be watching and participating and sharing hot takes because I don’t want to, and probably can’t, turn that part of me off. Perhaps X becomes a resounding success. Or it fails epically. Either way, I expect it will continue to be a very entertaining ride. 🫡
14:49

Like seemingly everyone on this app I have plenty of opinions about Twitter > X and figure now is a good time to open up a bit about my experience at the company. I tweeted for years into the void for the love of it like many of you, but after selling my startup to Twitter in 2020 I finally got to see it from the inside. Up close it was both amazing and terrible, like so many other companies and things in life. As someone with a maniacal sense of urgency built into me, Twitter often felt siloed and bureaucratic. Dumb power plays, reorgs and team name changes for the sake of someone’s ego were distractions that occurred too regularly. You couldn’t just be a builder — you also needed to be a politician. I was shocked by how old and bespoke the infrastructure was, but there was little will to think beyond quarterly earnings calls because we were all beholden to the masters of mDAU and revenue growth as a public company. It often felt like things were held together with duct tape and glue, and that many people had just accepted that a small product change could take months or quarters to build. Management had become bloated to accommodate career growth and the company culture felt too soft and entitled for my own taste. Healthy debate and criticism was replaced by a default refrain of “no, that can’t be done” or “another team owns that so don’t touch it”. Teams could spend months building a feature and then some last-minute kerfuffle meant it’d get killed for being too risky. Just talking directly to customers could turn into a turf war and create deadlocks between functions. I recall one such episode where a teammate spent a month trying to get clearance to reach out to some creators. He went through 3 layers of management and 6 different functional teams. In the end 4 executives were involved in the approval. It was insanity, and unfortunately I saw several top performers get burnt out and demoralized after exhausting experiences like that. Most people were good at their jobs but it was nearly impossible to fire poor performers — instead they got shuffled around to other teams because few managers had the will or resources to figure out how to get them out. A high performance culture pulls everyone up, but the opposite weighs everyone down. Twitter often felt like a place that kept squandering its own potential, which was sad and frustrating to see. The person who was best at cutting through the BS and inspiring a vision during my tenure was Kayvon Beykpour, but he wasn’t fully empowered to run the company since he wasn’t the CEO. Despite those real issues, I was lucky enough to work with some of the most talented people in the business at Twitter in product, design, engineering, research, legal, BD, trust & safety, marketing, PR and more. Often it was a small cross-functional team of intrinsically motivated people who made the biggest impact by challenging some core assumption. Those teams were very fun to be on but they felt like the exception rather than the rule. The months of waiting for the deal to close in 2022 were particularly slow and painful; it felt like leadership hid behind lawyers and legal language as all answers about the company’s future notoriously included the phrase “fiduciary duty”. Colleagues openly talked about how Twitter was being sold because leadership didn’t have conviction in their own plan or ability to fix longstanding problems. Although I didn’t know much about Elon I was cautiously optimistic – I saw him as the guy who built incredible and enduring companies like Tesla and SpaceX, so perhaps his private ownership could shake things up and breathe new life into the company. My take on what’s happened since then is full of lived nuance. When people ask why I stayed it’s easy to answer: optimism, curiosity, personal growth and money. From the beginning I saw that some changes Elon was going to make were smart and others were stupid, but when I’m on a team I uphold the philosophy of “praise in public and criticize in private”. I was far from a silent wallflower. I shared my opinions openly and pushed back often, both before and after the acquisition. I made peace with the fact that I didn’t have psychological safety at Twitter 2.0 and that meant I could be fired at any moment, and for no reason at all. I watched it happen repeatedly and saw how negatively it impacted team morale. Although I couldn’t change the situation I did my best to shine a light on folks who were doing important work while being an emotionally supportive leader for those who were struggling to adapt to the more brutalist and hardcore culture. In person Elon is oddly charming and he’s genuinely funny. He also has personality quirks like telling the same stories and jokes over and over. The challenge is his personality and demeanor can turn on a dime going from excited to angry. Since it was hard to read what mood he might be in and what his reaction would be to any given thing, people quickly became afraid of being called into meetings or having to share negative news with him. At times it felt like the inner circle was too zealous and fanatical in their unwavering support of everything he said. When individuals encouraged me to be careful about what I said I politely thanked them and said I would not be taking their advice. I had no interest in adding to a culture of fear or walking on eggshells around Elon. Either he would respect me for being real or he could fire me. Either outcome was okay. I quickly learned that product and business decisions were nearly always the result of him following his gut instinct, and he didn’t seem compelled to seek out or rely on a lot of data or expertise to inform it. That was particularly frustrating for me since I believed I had useful institutional knowledge that could help him make better decisions. Instead he'd poll Twitter, ask a friend, or even ask his biographer for product advice. At times it seemed he trusted random feedback more than the people in the room who spent their lives dedicated to tackling the problem at hand. I never figured out why and remain puzzled by it. I don’t think things had to be as difficult or dramatic as they turned out to be but I can’t say I’d bet against Elon or count him out. He’s smart and has enough money to make a lot of mistakes and then course correct when things go awry. As the largest shareholder he can tank the value in the short-term, but eventually he’ll need things to turn around. His focus on speed is incredible and he’s obviously not afraid of blowing things up, but now the real measure will be how it get reconstructed and if enough people want the new everything app he is building. I learned a ton from watching Elon up close – the good, the bad and the ugly. His boldness, passion and storytelling is inspiring, but his lack of process and empathy is painful. Elon has an exceptional talent for tackling hard physics-based problems but products that facilitate human connection and communication require a different type of social-emotional intelligence. Social networks are hard to kill but they’re not immune from death spirals. Only time will tell what the outcome will be but I hope X finds its footing because competition is good for consumers. In the meantime, I have a lot of empathy for the employees who are working tirelessly behind the scenes, the advertisers who want a stable platform to sell their stuff on, and the customers who are experiencing chaotic updates. It’s been a madhouse. Twitter moved at the speed of molasses and suffered from bureaucracy but now X is run by a mercurial leader whose instinct is driven by the unique and undoubtedly weird experience of being the biggest voice on the platform. Many of you know me from the sleeping bag incident where I slept on a conference room floor, so I figure, let’s talk about that too. Going viral was an odd and interesting experience. I was attacked by people on the left and called a billionaire bootlicker, while simultaneously being attacked by people on the right for being a working mom who was demonized as an example of a woman choosing her career over her family. Thankfully I can laugh at myself and I don’t take armchair keyboard ideologues too seriously. Being the main character on the timeline, even for a few minutes, requires a thick skin and a strong sense of self. The real story is pretty simple. I was given a nearly impossible deadline for his first project and as the product lead I would never ask anyone to do anything I wasn’t willing to do myself. So I worked round the clock alongside an amazing team spanning many timezones, and we delivered it on schedule – truly against the odds. It was intense but also fun. Those first few months were wildly crazy but I wanted to be there and I have no regrets. Showing up and giving it your all should, in most cases, be celebrated. Obviously you can’t work at that pace forever but there are moments where bursts are mission critical. I’ve pulled many all-nighters in my career and also when I was a student for something that mattered to me. I don’t regret putting in long hours or being ambitious, and feel proud of how far I’ve come from where I started thanks in part to that type of work ethic. I think of life as a game, and being at Twitter after the acquisition was like playing life at Level 10 on Hard Mode. Since I like taking on difficult challenges I found it interesting and rewarding because I was growing and learning so rapidly. I realize our society today trends toward polarization but when it comes to this app, its owner, and its future, I am neither a fangirl nor a hater — I’m an optimistic pragmatist. This may really irritate the internet but you cannot pigeonhole me into some radical position of either loving or hating every change that’s occurred. I escaped my fundamentalist upbringing and am a free thinker these days. Everyone can be seen as both a hero or a villain, depending on who is telling what angle of the story. Elon doesn’t deserve to be venerated or vilified. He’s a complicated person with an unfathomable amount of financial and geopolitical power which is why humanity needs him to err on the side of goodness, rather than political divisiveness and pettiness. I disagree with many of his decisions and am surprised by his willingness to burn so much down, but with enough money and time, something new & innovative may emerge. I hope it does. Sometimes I get asked about how I felt when I got laid off, and the truth is it was the best gift I’ve ever received. Sure the headlines and punchlines wrote themselves but I was battle hardened by then. I knew that I’d worked in a way where I could walk out with my head held high. I have no bitterness about the Product Management team being dismantled, and it made sense for me to exit as nearly all of the remaining PMs were let go. Going on a sabbatical afterward has been exactly what I needed to decompress and I’m finally feeling rested and relaxed. I’m a creative and a builder, so sooner than later I’ll jump back into a high intensity company but I’m grateful for this season of thinking, reading, traveling and being with people I love. After having time to reflect I believe more than ever that the very best outcomes flow from great leadership that combines the head and the heart. I’d be remiss if I didn’t note that in all of this there is also a cautionary tale for anyone who succeeds at something — which is that the higher you climb, the smaller your world becomes. It’s a strange paradox but the richest and most powerful people are also some of the most isolated. I found myself frequently looking at Elon and seeing a person who seemed quite alone because his time and energy was so purely devoted to work, which is not the model of a life I want to live. Money and fame can create psychological prisons which may worsen mental health conditions. We’ve all seen high profile cases of celebrities who end up with some combination of depression, paranoia, delusions of grandeur, mania and/or erratic behavior. Living in an echo chamber is dangerous and being at the top makes a person even more susceptible to being surrounded by yes people when nearly everyone around you is on the payroll and somehow stands to benefit from being in your orbit. Figuring out how to keep “better angels” around in the form of family, friends, and teammates is critical to staying on the rails and enduring intense ups and downs. Everyone needs to hear hard truths sometimes and if you fire all the people who speak up then the reality distortion field may just turn into a vortex. I was drawn to Twitter because I’m obsessed with the problem of loneliness and connection between people. I find it fascinating & troubling that humans are getting lonelier as we simultaneously create a world that’s both safer and wealthier. I don’t believe that trade-off has to exist, which is why I keep returning to that theme in my personal and professional life. I realize this is too long of a tweet but Twitter was a weird and special place on the internet, and I’m grateful to have played a teeny tiny role in its story and evolution. I’m here for whatever comes next — on this app and in new places. Consumer social is very much alive and at a fascinating juncture, so I’ll be watching and participating and sharing hot takes because I don’t want to, and probably can’t, turn that part of me off. Perhaps X becomes a resounding success. Or it fails epically. Either way, I expect it will continue to be a very entertaining ride. 🫡

Esther Crawford ✨

5,501,661 просмотров • 3 лет назад

In 2018, Jeff Bezos sat down for a 70-minute interview with David Rubenstein in front of Washington's most powerful crowd and explained exactly how he thinks, decides and lives. He didn't lecture on algorithms or logistics once. He talked about knee pads, regret and going to bed early: 1. Three good decisions a day is enough Most executives think leadership means firing off calls nonstop. Bezos rejects that entirely. He explained that "As a senior executive, you get paid to make a small number of high quality decisions." Then he made the number explicit: "If I make, like, three good decisions a day, that's enough. And they should be as high quality as I can make them." 2. Protect the hours when your brain actually works He doesn't schedule his day randomly. He books his hardest thinking early and is honest about when he runs out of gas. "I like to do my high IQ meetings before lunch," he says. "Because by 5 p.m., I'm like, 'I can't think about that today. Let's try this again tomorrow.'" 3. Sleep is a strategic decision, not a luxury Bezos ran the maths on cutting his sleep to squeeze in more decisions and rejected it outright, asking "Is that really worth it if the quality of these decisions might be lower because you're tired, or grouchy or any number of things?" For him the answer was simple: "I think better, I have more energy, my mood is better." 4. Puttering in the morning isn't wasted time He doesn't rush into his inbox the second he wakes up. "I like to putter in the mornings. I like to read the newspaper. I like to drink coffee." That slow start is what makes the sharp decisions later in the day possible. 5. Trust your gut on the decisions that matter most Most founders assume the biggest calls need the most data. Bezos found the opposite. "All of my best decisions in business and in life have been made with heart, intuition, guts, ... not analysis." He was careful to add the nuance though: "If you can make a decision with analysis, you should do so. But it turns out in life that your most important decisions are always made with instinct and intuition." 6. Everything you're impressed by started small People meet Bezos now and see a trillion-dollar company. He remembers something else. "Everything I've ever done has started small. It's hard to remember for you guys, but for me it's like yesterday I was driving the packages to the post office myself and hoping one day we could afford a forklift." 7. The best idea in the room usually isn't yours Early on, Bezos was packing boxes on a concrete floor at 1am and pitched a fix for his aching knees. He admits "I didn't have packing tables. I said to one of the software engineers who was packing alongside me, 'You know what we should do? We should get knee pads.'" The engineer wasn't impressed. "And he looked at me like I was the dumbest guy he had ever seen in his life, and he said 'Jeff, we should get packing tables.'" Bezos didn't defend his own idea. He bought the tables the next day. 8. Don't feel smarter when the stock goes up Amazon's share price has swung wildly for two decades, and Bezos has trained his whole company not to read into the swings. He repeats a version of this line at every all-hands: "When the stock is up 30 percent in a month, don't feel 30 percent smarter, because when the stock is down 30 percent in a month, it's not going to feel so good to feel 30 percent dumber." He leans on the Buffett line he can't stop quoting, that "in the short run the stock market is a voting machine, in the long run it's a weighing machine." 9. Regret is about the things you didn't try Weighing whether to leave a stable Wall Street job to sell books on the internet, Bezos didn't build a spreadsheet. He thought about which choice he'd regret more at 80. His conclusion: "Our regrets are acts of omission, they're things we didn't try, it's the path untraveled." That single idea, more than any business plan, is what got Amazon started. 10. Being scrutinised is the price of being big, not something personal Asked about regulators and critics circling the tech industry, Bezos didn't get defensive. "All big institutions of any kind are going to be and should be examined, scrutinized, inspected," he said. Then he added the line that reframes the whole thing: "It's not personal, it's kind of what we as a society want to have happen." Here's the thing though.... Bezos didn't need to give this interview. He was already the richest man alive before he sat down with Rubenstein that night. But by then he'd already made himself public, buying a newspaper, showing up on stages, letting cameras into rooms most billionaires avoid. T hat single 70-minute conversation about knee pads and regret has been quoted by CNBC, Fortune, Yahoo and Bloomberg for seven years and counting. The companies made him powerful. Choosing to be visible is what made every one of his sentences travel far beyond that room in Washington, and kept compounding long after the microphones switched off. Speaking of compounding: We build massive distribution and grow personal brands on X and beyond without our clients lifting a finger. If you're a founder or VC looking for that kind of exposure, book a call below. Over a billion views and $4m attributable revenue for 17 clients to date.
1:09:57

In 2018, Jeff Bezos sat down for a 70-minute interview with David Rubenstein in front of Washington's most powerful crowd and explained exactly how he thinks, decides and lives. He didn't lecture on algorithms or logistics once. He talked about knee pads, regret and going to bed early: 1. Three good decisions a day is enough Most executives think leadership means firing off calls nonstop. Bezos rejects that entirely. He explained that "As a senior executive, you get paid to make a small number of high quality decisions." Then he made the number explicit: "If I make, like, three good decisions a day, that's enough. And they should be as high quality as I can make them." 2. Protect the hours when your brain actually works He doesn't schedule his day randomly. He books his hardest thinking early and is honest about when he runs out of gas. "I like to do my high IQ meetings before lunch," he says. "Because by 5 p.m., I'm like, 'I can't think about that today. Let's try this again tomorrow.'" 3. Sleep is a strategic decision, not a luxury Bezos ran the maths on cutting his sleep to squeeze in more decisions and rejected it outright, asking "Is that really worth it if the quality of these decisions might be lower because you're tired, or grouchy or any number of things?" For him the answer was simple: "I think better, I have more energy, my mood is better." 4. Puttering in the morning isn't wasted time He doesn't rush into his inbox the second he wakes up. "I like to putter in the mornings. I like to read the newspaper. I like to drink coffee." That slow start is what makes the sharp decisions later in the day possible. 5. Trust your gut on the decisions that matter most Most founders assume the biggest calls need the most data. Bezos found the opposite. "All of my best decisions in business and in life have been made with heart, intuition, guts, ... not analysis." He was careful to add the nuance though: "If you can make a decision with analysis, you should do so. But it turns out in life that your most important decisions are always made with instinct and intuition." 6. Everything you're impressed by started small People meet Bezos now and see a trillion-dollar company. He remembers something else. "Everything I've ever done has started small. It's hard to remember for you guys, but for me it's like yesterday I was driving the packages to the post office myself and hoping one day we could afford a forklift." 7. The best idea in the room usually isn't yours Early on, Bezos was packing boxes on a concrete floor at 1am and pitched a fix for his aching knees. He admits "I didn't have packing tables. I said to one of the software engineers who was packing alongside me, 'You know what we should do? We should get knee pads.'" The engineer wasn't impressed. "And he looked at me like I was the dumbest guy he had ever seen in his life, and he said 'Jeff, we should get packing tables.'" Bezos didn't defend his own idea. He bought the tables the next day. 8. Don't feel smarter when the stock goes up Amazon's share price has swung wildly for two decades, and Bezos has trained his whole company not to read into the swings. He repeats a version of this line at every all-hands: "When the stock is up 30 percent in a month, don't feel 30 percent smarter, because when the stock is down 30 percent in a month, it's not going to feel so good to feel 30 percent dumber." He leans on the Buffett line he can't stop quoting, that "in the short run the stock market is a voting machine, in the long run it's a weighing machine." 9. Regret is about the things you didn't try Weighing whether to leave a stable Wall Street job to sell books on the internet, Bezos didn't build a spreadsheet. He thought about which choice he'd regret more at 80. His conclusion: "Our regrets are acts of omission, they're things we didn't try, it's the path untraveled." That single idea, more than any business plan, is what got Amazon started. 10. Being scrutinised is the price of being big, not something personal Asked about regulators and critics circling the tech industry, Bezos didn't get defensive. "All big institutions of any kind are going to be and should be examined, scrutinized, inspected," he said. Then he added the line that reframes the whole thing: "It's not personal, it's kind of what we as a society want to have happen." Here's the thing though.... Bezos didn't need to give this interview. He was already the richest man alive before he sat down with Rubenstein that night. But by then he'd already made himself public, buying a newspaper, showing up on stages, letting cameras into rooms most billionaires avoid. T hat single 70-minute conversation about knee pads and regret has been quoted by CNBC, Fortune, Yahoo and Bloomberg for seven years and counting. The companies made him powerful. Choosing to be visible is what made every one of his sentences travel far beyond that room in Washington, and kept compounding long after the microphones switched off. Speaking of compounding: We build massive distribution and grow personal brands on X and beyond without our clients lifting a finger. If you're a founder or VC looking for that kind of exposure, book a call below. Over a billion views and $4m attributable revenue for 17 clients to date.

Lewis 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿

15,982 просмотров • 1 месяц назад

John Mayer is a master of his craft. He’s also one of the best I’ve come across at using analogy and demonstration to articulate and demystify the creative process. Here’s a 14-clip (~7-minute) masterclass on mastery and creativity: TL;DW 1/ “Whenever I want to write a big song, I can't...That's when I get writer's block: when I try to write a song to fill the entire galaxy. I've never gotten a song that way. But if I write about something the size of a glass of water—a week later, I notice it's got the universe in it. So I'd rather have the universe in a glass of water than try to make a glass of water fit in the universe.” 2/ "What connects with people is you connecting with yourself." 3/ “Writer’s block is when the two people inside of you—the writer and the reader—when the reader doesn’t love the writer. It is not a failure to write. It is a failure to catch the feedback loop of enjoying what you’re seeing and wanting to contribute more to it.” 4/ “Don't shoot ideas down before you have them. 'That won't work' is the worst thing you can ever say. 'That didn't work' is cool, but 'that won't work' is not a way to go through life.” 5/ “I’ve seen the Cool metric change so many times. I'm not telling you don't chase Cool. I'm saying…by the time you reach what you think is cool, Cool is like, 'over here now.’ ‘The princess is in another castle.' You know what I mean? That's a Mario reference.” 6/ "I'm one-half consumer, one-half artist. So I try to put music out that I myself would want to hear as somebody on the other end." 7/ "I'm seeing a lot of motivation about you following your passion, but I'm not seeing any critical thought to what that is or how to be better at that. So, really the product is passion and that's strange to me. Because my product growing up was sitting in a room yelling, 'Mom, I'm practicing,' for hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours. 8/ "But then also read up...You know, this stuff doesn't just appear. It comes from somewhere. And as soon as you realize you love something—it's almost like catching up with some great TV show on season 9, and you can go, 'oh my God, that means there's 8 seasons before this." 9/ "Whatever you learn is the tip of the iceberg. Dive underwater and find the rest of the iceberg." 10/ "So listening to Stevie Ray Vaughan brought me back to people like Kenny Burrell and Albert King and Jimi Hendrix and Elmore James. So it became this family tree growing out of my CD player." 11/ "I came up with these guys as like references…It’s like if you're into the NBA and you wear different jerseys and you pretend you're a different player in the driveway—that's what I was doing..." 12/ "Which is a wonderful technique for being yourself. Failing to sound exactly like the person you want to sound like is a wonderful way to sound like yourself." 13/ After watching Cory Wong play guitar, Mayer told him, "You have an anatomy thing working on your right hand. Your hand is shaped in a way—you have long fingers, very sinewy hands—that you're able to play like that. That is an example of someone making the most of their anatomical gifts... And I wish more people could embrace finding what their strengths are anatomically—the way your hand is shaped, the way your mind works, whatever—and play to those strengths." 14/ Mayer picks up an acoustic guitar and demonstrates his songwriting process. “Well, I don’t always do it,” he admitted, “because it requires a stupid bravery all the time.” “You just stare at the corner of the wall," Mayer explains then improvises some vocals, “stare at the corner of the wall / try to get it going on / but I can’t sometimes / you just keep going ’til you get something,” he stops singing. “You gotta keep forcing it, forcing it, forcing it…it doesn’t matter [what comes out of your mouth].” Follow Billy Oppenheimer for more content like this!
6:57

John Mayer is a master of his craft. He’s also one of the best I’ve come across at using analogy and demonstration to articulate and demystify the creative process. Here’s a 14-clip (~7-minute) masterclass on mastery and creativity: TL;DW 1/ “Whenever I want to write a big song, I can't...That's when I get writer's block: when I try to write a song to fill the entire galaxy. I've never gotten a song that way. But if I write about something the size of a glass of water—a week later, I notice it's got the universe in it. So I'd rather have the universe in a glass of water than try to make a glass of water fit in the universe.” 2/ "What connects with people is you connecting with yourself." 3/ “Writer’s block is when the two people inside of you—the writer and the reader—when the reader doesn’t love the writer. It is not a failure to write. It is a failure to catch the feedback loop of enjoying what you’re seeing and wanting to contribute more to it.” 4/ “Don't shoot ideas down before you have them. 'That won't work' is the worst thing you can ever say. 'That didn't work' is cool, but 'that won't work' is not a way to go through life.” 5/ “I’ve seen the Cool metric change so many times. I'm not telling you don't chase Cool. I'm saying…by the time you reach what you think is cool, Cool is like, 'over here now.’ ‘The princess is in another castle.' You know what I mean? That's a Mario reference.” 6/ "I'm one-half consumer, one-half artist. So I try to put music out that I myself would want to hear as somebody on the other end." 7/ "I'm seeing a lot of motivation about you following your passion, but I'm not seeing any critical thought to what that is or how to be better at that. So, really the product is passion and that's strange to me. Because my product growing up was sitting in a room yelling, 'Mom, I'm practicing,' for hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours. 8/ "But then also read up...You know, this stuff doesn't just appear. It comes from somewhere. And as soon as you realize you love something—it's almost like catching up with some great TV show on season 9, and you can go, 'oh my God, that means there's 8 seasons before this." 9/ "Whatever you learn is the tip of the iceberg. Dive underwater and find the rest of the iceberg." 10/ "So listening to Stevie Ray Vaughan brought me back to people like Kenny Burrell and Albert King and Jimi Hendrix and Elmore James. So it became this family tree growing out of my CD player." 11/ "I came up with these guys as like references…It’s like if you're into the NBA and you wear different jerseys and you pretend you're a different player in the driveway—that's what I was doing..." 12/ "Which is a wonderful technique for being yourself. Failing to sound exactly like the person you want to sound like is a wonderful way to sound like yourself." 13/ After watching Cory Wong play guitar, Mayer told him, "You have an anatomy thing working on your right hand. Your hand is shaped in a way—you have long fingers, very sinewy hands—that you're able to play like that. That is an example of someone making the most of their anatomical gifts... And I wish more people could embrace finding what their strengths are anatomically—the way your hand is shaped, the way your mind works, whatever—and play to those strengths." 14/ Mayer picks up an acoustic guitar and demonstrates his songwriting process. “Well, I don’t always do it,” he admitted, “because it requires a stupid bravery all the time.” “You just stare at the corner of the wall," Mayer explains then improvises some vocals, “stare at the corner of the wall / try to get it going on / but I can’t sometimes / you just keep going ’til you get something,” he stops singing. “You gotta keep forcing it, forcing it, forcing it…it doesn’t matter [what comes out of your mouth].” Follow Billy Oppenheimer for more content like this!

Billy Oppenheimer

1,382,401 просмотров • 3 лет назад

The “I never wanted any of this to be public or content” Lie, A Timeline I never wanted any of this to come out. Except I actually mean that. It’s embarrassing, it’s trashy, and it’s the opposite of how I want to present myself publicly. I stayed silent for months while lie after lie was spun about me behind the scenes because I didn’t want to air private, messy moments from a relationship I genuinely cared about. I stayed silent out of fear, because I was told no one would believe me because he would be blindly believed on his large platform. In one of our very last conversations before I blocked him everywhere mid-October, he threatened to do a show on me, contact my employer, and “turn me into the next Lindsey”. Why? Because I didn’t want to continue apologizing to him for the 300th time about venting to someone I thought was a friend. I stayed silent because of these threats. But after Wednesday, after Chelsea posted the private video Aidan gave her, (the same one he threatened me with directly back on 10/2), and after the gaslighting, I don’t have a choice anymore. So here is the timeline. Here are the receipts. Here is what actually happened. September-October 2025- I Stayed Silent Through Months of Smear Campaigns For months, several creators repeated the same false narrative that “Aidan never said a bad word about Meredith.” Jess. Glarer. Auntie Deb. Kim. Ray from Dallas. Others. Meanwhile, Aidan was: • Badmouthing me privately and encouraging others to do so publicly, • Texting Joe “Flipperhead” entire paragraphs trashing me, • Aidan knew Joe would leak them (and even bragged on a stream that he did exactly that so he’d leak them), • Sending Jess Machado after me for months on her large platform, • Directing people behind the scenes to paint me as a villain. • Sending random people who supported me DMs to change their mind (yes Aidan, not everyone is fooled by your bullshit and they came right to me). I ignored all of it. I said nothing. I stayed silent through daily lies because I didn’t want to call more attention to it or face Aidan’s wrath. November 2025 -The Rumors About “March 4” and Joe Flipperhead Flips to Team Aidan Aidan texted Joe his entire made-up version weeks ago. Joe circulated those texts on purpose. Joe threatened me with posting a video montage of mine and Aidan’s private texts. Joe is a pussy so he eventually had Kristy post it for him. Creators discussed it publicly without me ever responding. I STILL didn’t defend myself. November 26-27, 2025- Ratchet Chelsea: The Full 48 Hour Meltdown 11/26/25— The Unprovoked Attack & The March 4 Video On Tuesday night, Chelsea came out of nowhere and launched herself straight at me, accusing me of all kinds of conspiracies from harassment to the horrific crime of sending a friend request, which is explained in vivid detail in the below post (she’s since gone somewhat viral, love this for her!) She spent the next 24 hours thoroughly embarrassing herself and the moment anyone challenged her story even slightly, she did what she always does: she imploded. Her accusations spiraled into her posting the March 4 video. On 11/26/25 at 11:08 PM, Chelsea posted the first clip–a blanket, context-less snippet of me drunk saying something I immediately apologized for the next morning. At 11:50 PM, I responded because at that point, I had no choice. 11/27/25— The 9-Minute Backpedal Then on Thanksgiving, Aidan tried to save face by posting that he “didn’t want the video to be public.” And like clockwork, nine minutes later, Chelsea came charging into the comments like a Temu-sponsored bat out of hell, scrambling to apologize, trying to rewrite reality so it looked like he didn’t send her to do it. It was panicked, sloppy damage control. An amateur quality cover-up attempt that only made it more obvious how coordinated this all was. She wasn’t apologizing because she grew a conscience. She was apologizing because she got caught doing exactly what she’d been primed to do. I wonder if Aidan called her “you should’ve waited at least 20 minutes, dumbass!!!”. Not too bright that Chelsea. I can only imagine the regrets he must have for utilizing someone with the IQ of a pencil to do his dirty work. The Coordination Between Aidan & Chelsea Is Obvious Chelsea had virtually NO followers Wednesday morning. Aidan was one of the first. We’re supposed to believe someone with 150k followers just stumbled on an account that starts posting HIS private messages and HIS private videos? Kk. Aidan commented on her posts that same day, clearly encouraging it, continuing to this day, all while pretending he's not directing it. Kk. She confirmed in my DMs back on 11/6 that she and Aidan were aligned. And she literally wrote at 4:04 AM that she had “proof,” videos & screenshots she would release if I didn’t “stop calling” her, calls she still hasn’t produced a single shred of proof of. Then yesterday within 9 minutes of his post, she writes: “Sorry for going rogue, Aidan, I hope you don’t hate my guts.” Going rogue? From WHAT? Who gave you the material in the first place? The coordination is obvious to anyone with functioning brain cells. The “I never wanted this public” lie Aidan’s post yesterday claimed he “never wanted this to be public.” He’s been threatening me for months behind the scenes to post the infamous video. To do a show on me. To send things to others to weaponize against me. If this were true, why did he instruct Chelsea to post it? Why did he share it with Jess Machado to threaten me with for the last month? Why did he share it with Joe Flipperhead, and God knows who else? If he didn’t want it public, he wouldn’t have shared it with anyone, let alone the girl I caught him cheating with. The timeline is clear– Chelsea posted a video at 11:08 pm on Thanksgiving Eve, I responded at 11:50 out of self defense. He leaked first. He escalated first. He weaponized it first. Trying to rewrite that now is gaslighting, pure and simple. The “Meredith accused him of abuse” narrative is FALSE My actions tell the truth: • I never went to police. • I never filed anything. • I never told anyone he hit me. • I never repeated it. • I apologized the next day. • We stayed together for FOUR more months after that night. • He called me 100+ times some days, even indicating he’d end his life if we broke up. If he believed I was “dangerous,” his actions would have said that. They didn’t. The only reason this is public now is because HE leaked it. Actions > drunk slurred words said because a camera was shoved in my face when I asked him repeatedly to stop filming and to leave. The Wilbur Theatre Rumors—Let’s get petty for a second. This is another topic I’m cringing at discussing but we can thank Aidan for since he shared our sexual messages with Joe Flipperhead. And since some people (Auntie Deb, sweetie, this means you) insist on pushing their Dollar Store fan-fiction about the Wilbur Theatre night, let’s actually walk through what happened, using facts instead of whatever drug-induced hallucinations you’ve been spinning this week. The rumor goes like this- I was “mad at Aidan because we didn’t hook up,” and to “prove” it, they trot out a cherry-picked text where I said I wanted to hook up, he didn’t answer, and the next morning I said I was drunk and sorry. And somehow this has been spun into me being desperate, obsessed, or pining like a background character in a teenage soap opera. Adorable. Wrong, but adorable. Here’s the real plot twist-Aidan and I had already been together literally two days earlier, and shocker-that was initiated by him, not me. I didn’t just “show up at the Wilbur”. He invited me to come to the after party at Encore knowing I had a wedding earlier in the night. I wanted to see my friends there who I actually met to go with. This wasn’t a surprise, it was planned ahead of time. The “I was drunk, sorry” message wasn’t heartbreak. It wasn’t longing. It was me politely tapping the brakes because I didn’t even want to entertain whatever bad path it could lead us back down. And then? He texted me asking about my brother’s wedding, how I am, etc. I ignored him for a full week. Until I had no choice but to speak to him about MereNeill. That silence, from me, is what triggered his latest meltdown. Not mine. His. So no, Auntie Deb, your version isn’t “a different perspective.” It’s just wrong. Like wildly, hilariously, not-even-in-the-ballpark wrong. But sure, keep spinning fanfic if it makes your livestreams feel more exciting. I realize it’s probably been awhile since you’ve had any action since you’ve let yourself go so badly, so you live vicariously through others. Recap For MONTHS I ignored: • the texts he sent Joe to leak • the smear campaign • the creators parroting lies • the behind-the-scenes messages • the insinuations I hacked him and even shared revenge porn • the constant coordinated attacks • the threats of “turning me into the next Lindsey” • his warning that everyone would believe him because of his platform • the threats to contact my employer I didn’t clap back, didn’t retaliate, didn’t respond. But Wednesday, when Chelsea dumped the video he gave her, the same video she threatened weeks ago to drop, AND he posted pretending he didn’t want this all out? That was the line. They chose the nuclear option. And last night's gaslighting grift was just the icing on the cake. Now I’m responding with facts in pure self-defense. Conclusion/Message for Temu Storm This entire mess could have stayed private. I wanted it to stay private. But when someone leaks your private moments, lies about your intentions, weaponizes your past, and coordinates an online attack, you either let the false narrative stand or you defend yourself. I’m choosing to defend myself with receipts, not gossip. With timelines, not “he said.” With evidence, not weaponized drunk clips. And then there’s Aidan’s favorite delusion. The claim that I was ‘working with Karen behind the scenes’ or ‘conspiring with her to get him in trouble for the recording.’ That could not be further from the truth. I didn’t even know he had recorded her until after she already knew about it herself. I wasn’t working with her, plotting with her, or communicating with her about it. She and I have always been friendly, but we didn’t even discuss the recording until it started leaking and Joe Flipperhead went feral on Twitter. Meanwhile, Aidan spent weeks screaming at me, accusing me of being some kind of secret double agent, like he was trying to create the betrayal he was terrified of. Almost a self-fulfilling prophecy. And here’s the reality: in the last few weeks, after he’s gone fully scorched earth on me, I have talked to her, and I support her 100%. The things he’s done to her over the past couple years, and the way he twisted it all for his followers, is the exact same manipulation I lived through. I’m not going into her details because that’s her story to tell… but let’s just say I have a feeling you’ll be hearing it sooner rather than later. The lie that Aidan never wanted this to be public is just laughable at this point. Who are we kidding? He's been foaming at the mouth for months to make this content where he can play the victim, as usual. And since this week has apparently become “Let’s All Fixate on Meredith Week,” let me address the content-creator sideshow, too. Some of you are strangers, while some I actually considered my friends. It’s shocking but not shocking how quickly you all flip a switch and follow your captain’s orders. Ray from Dallas spent his Sunday foaming at the mouth in a hostile little video about me, all bark, no substance. I saw it. I’m not intimidated. Mostly, I’m embarrassed for you. Then there’s Will, who’s gone on multiple streams calling me “crazy” and pretending he’s scared of me, despite me being nothing but nice to him. Why? Because he thinks I was the first one to tell Karen he heard the recording, which he absolutely did (unless Aidan is lying about who he played it for, but we know he’s actually telling the truth on this for once). She was informed of it the very next day, which is why she called you and you know this. This was two full days before I was even aware of a call at all. Will, for someone with your track record, maybe sit the “women are dangerous” narrative out. You’re not fooling anyone. I’m staring at 15 pages of police reports and no, it’s not all “things you’ve owned up for in the past”. You know this. Again, I’d take a very large seat here. And my personal favorite-Auntie Deb, who decided to spice up his Spaces on Thanksgiving by accusing me of distributing revenge p*rn with zero evidence, zero screenshots, zero anything. Accusing me of killing a turtle yesterday. A completely fabricated felony tossed around like it’s gossip hour at the bingo hall. Considering your own professional history, James, I’d hope you of all people would understand how catastrophic false accusations can be, but apparently not. I wonder if you’ll have that same enthusiasm when the topic is you. TBD. I’ll wait for that retraction about revenge p*rn, animal abuse, etc. Ball’s in your court hun. And of course, there’s Jessica Machado, who’s been grinding this axe for months like it’s her full-time personality. Hos long did you cry when Chelsea beat you to the punch with that video? Don’t worry hun, there’s more but she didn’t post it because it’s not great for your fairytale. Since you reported my last post, I'll leave the rest up for your imagination. You’ve been so obsessed with me for so long that you can’t even keep your own narratives straight anymore. I love this so much for you. Let me be crystal clear–I am done being all of your punching bag. You love to spin this narrative that I’m this dangerous person. You’d think you’d lay off from constantly f*cking with me if you truly believed that. I would genuinely love for this nonsense to stop. But that requires ALL of you to stop manufacturing drama, stop lying, and stop weaponizing made-up crimes for clicks. And if they want to keep going? I’ve got plenty of content for many seasons to come.
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The “I never wanted any of this to be public or content” Lie, A Timeline I never wanted any of this to come out. Except I actually mean that. It’s embarrassing, it’s trashy, and it’s the opposite of how I want to present myself publicly. I stayed silent for months while lie after lie was spun about me behind the scenes because I didn’t want to air private, messy moments from a relationship I genuinely cared about. I stayed silent out of fear, because I was told no one would believe me because he would be blindly believed on his large platform. In one of our very last conversations before I blocked him everywhere mid-October, he threatened to do a show on me, contact my employer, and “turn me into the next Lindsey”. Why? Because I didn’t want to continue apologizing to him for the 300th time about venting to someone I thought was a friend. I stayed silent because of these threats. But after Wednesday, after Chelsea posted the private video Aidan gave her, (the same one he threatened me with directly back on 10/2), and after the gaslighting, I don’t have a choice anymore. So here is the timeline. Here are the receipts. Here is what actually happened. September-October 2025- I Stayed Silent Through Months of Smear Campaigns For months, several creators repeated the same false narrative that “Aidan never said a bad word about Meredith.” Jess. Glarer. Auntie Deb. Kim. Ray from Dallas. Others. Meanwhile, Aidan was: • Badmouthing me privately and encouraging others to do so publicly, • Texting Joe “Flipperhead” entire paragraphs trashing me, • Aidan knew Joe would leak them (and even bragged on a stream that he did exactly that so he’d leak them), • Sending Jess Machado after me for months on her large platform, • Directing people behind the scenes to paint me as a villain. • Sending random people who supported me DMs to change their mind (yes Aidan, not everyone is fooled by your bullshit and they came right to me). I ignored all of it. I said nothing. I stayed silent through daily lies because I didn’t want to call more attention to it or face Aidan’s wrath. November 2025 -The Rumors About “March 4” and Joe Flipperhead Flips to Team Aidan Aidan texted Joe his entire made-up version weeks ago. Joe circulated those texts on purpose. Joe threatened me with posting a video montage of mine and Aidan’s private texts. Joe is a pussy so he eventually had Kristy post it for him. Creators discussed it publicly without me ever responding. I STILL didn’t defend myself. November 26-27, 2025- Ratchet Chelsea: The Full 48 Hour Meltdown 11/26/25— The Unprovoked Attack & The March 4 Video On Tuesday night, Chelsea came out of nowhere and launched herself straight at me, accusing me of all kinds of conspiracies from harassment to the horrific crime of sending a friend request, which is explained in vivid detail in the below post (she’s since gone somewhat viral, love this for her!) She spent the next 24 hours thoroughly embarrassing herself and the moment anyone challenged her story even slightly, she did what she always does: she imploded. Her accusations spiraled into her posting the March 4 video. On 11/26/25 at 11:08 PM, Chelsea posted the first clip–a blanket, context-less snippet of me drunk saying something I immediately apologized for the next morning. At 11:50 PM, I responded because at that point, I had no choice. 11/27/25— The 9-Minute Backpedal Then on Thanksgiving, Aidan tried to save face by posting that he “didn’t want the video to be public.” And like clockwork, nine minutes later, Chelsea came charging into the comments like a Temu-sponsored bat out of hell, scrambling to apologize, trying to rewrite reality so it looked like he didn’t send her to do it. It was panicked, sloppy damage control. An amateur quality cover-up attempt that only made it more obvious how coordinated this all was. She wasn’t apologizing because she grew a conscience. She was apologizing because she got caught doing exactly what she’d been primed to do. I wonder if Aidan called her “you should’ve waited at least 20 minutes, dumbass!!!”. Not too bright that Chelsea. I can only imagine the regrets he must have for utilizing someone with the IQ of a pencil to do his dirty work. The Coordination Between Aidan & Chelsea Is Obvious Chelsea had virtually NO followers Wednesday morning. Aidan was one of the first. We’re supposed to believe someone with 150k followers just stumbled on an account that starts posting HIS private messages and HIS private videos? Kk. Aidan commented on her posts that same day, clearly encouraging it, continuing to this day, all while pretending he's not directing it. Kk. She confirmed in my DMs back on 11/6 that she and Aidan were aligned. And she literally wrote at 4:04 AM that she had “proof,” videos & screenshots she would release if I didn’t “stop calling” her, calls she still hasn’t produced a single shred of proof of. Then yesterday within 9 minutes of his post, she writes: “Sorry for going rogue, Aidan, I hope you don’t hate my guts.” Going rogue? From WHAT? Who gave you the material in the first place? The coordination is obvious to anyone with functioning brain cells. The “I never wanted this public” lie Aidan’s post yesterday claimed he “never wanted this to be public.” He’s been threatening me for months behind the scenes to post the infamous video. To do a show on me. To send things to others to weaponize against me. If this were true, why did he instruct Chelsea to post it? Why did he share it with Jess Machado to threaten me with for the last month? Why did he share it with Joe Flipperhead, and God knows who else? If he didn’t want it public, he wouldn’t have shared it with anyone, let alone the girl I caught him cheating with. The timeline is clear– Chelsea posted a video at 11:08 pm on Thanksgiving Eve, I responded at 11:50 out of self defense. He leaked first. He escalated first. He weaponized it first. Trying to rewrite that now is gaslighting, pure and simple. The “Meredith accused him of abuse” narrative is FALSE My actions tell the truth: • I never went to police. • I never filed anything. • I never told anyone he hit me. • I never repeated it. • I apologized the next day. • We stayed together for FOUR more months after that night. • He called me 100+ times some days, even indicating he’d end his life if we broke up. If he believed I was “dangerous,” his actions would have said that. They didn’t. The only reason this is public now is because HE leaked it. Actions > drunk slurred words said because a camera was shoved in my face when I asked him repeatedly to stop filming and to leave. The Wilbur Theatre Rumors—Let’s get petty for a second. This is another topic I’m cringing at discussing but we can thank Aidan for since he shared our sexual messages with Joe Flipperhead. And since some people (Auntie Deb, sweetie, this means you) insist on pushing their Dollar Store fan-fiction about the Wilbur Theatre night, let’s actually walk through what happened, using facts instead of whatever drug-induced hallucinations you’ve been spinning this week. The rumor goes like this- I was “mad at Aidan because we didn’t hook up,” and to “prove” it, they trot out a cherry-picked text where I said I wanted to hook up, he didn’t answer, and the next morning I said I was drunk and sorry. And somehow this has been spun into me being desperate, obsessed, or pining like a background character in a teenage soap opera. Adorable. Wrong, but adorable. Here’s the real plot twist-Aidan and I had already been together literally two days earlier, and shocker-that was initiated by him, not me. I didn’t just “show up at the Wilbur”. He invited me to come to the after party at Encore knowing I had a wedding earlier in the night. I wanted to see my friends there who I actually met to go with. This wasn’t a surprise, it was planned ahead of time. The “I was drunk, sorry” message wasn’t heartbreak. It wasn’t longing. It was me politely tapping the brakes because I didn’t even want to entertain whatever bad path it could lead us back down. And then? He texted me asking about my brother’s wedding, how I am, etc. I ignored him for a full week. Until I had no choice but to speak to him about MereNeill. That silence, from me, is what triggered his latest meltdown. Not mine. His. So no, Auntie Deb, your version isn’t “a different perspective.” It’s just wrong. Like wildly, hilariously, not-even-in-the-ballpark wrong. But sure, keep spinning fanfic if it makes your livestreams feel more exciting. I realize it’s probably been awhile since you’ve had any action since you’ve let yourself go so badly, so you live vicariously through others. Recap For MONTHS I ignored: • the texts he sent Joe to leak • the smear campaign • the creators parroting lies • the behind-the-scenes messages • the insinuations I hacked him and even shared revenge porn • the constant coordinated attacks • the threats of “turning me into the next Lindsey” • his warning that everyone would believe him because of his platform • the threats to contact my employer I didn’t clap back, didn’t retaliate, didn’t respond. But Wednesday, when Chelsea dumped the video he gave her, the same video she threatened weeks ago to drop, AND he posted pretending he didn’t want this all out? That was the line. They chose the nuclear option. And last night's gaslighting grift was just the icing on the cake. Now I’m responding with facts in pure self-defense. Conclusion/Message for Temu Storm This entire mess could have stayed private. I wanted it to stay private. But when someone leaks your private moments, lies about your intentions, weaponizes your past, and coordinates an online attack, you either let the false narrative stand or you defend yourself. I’m choosing to defend myself with receipts, not gossip. With timelines, not “he said.” With evidence, not weaponized drunk clips. And then there’s Aidan’s favorite delusion. The claim that I was ‘working with Karen behind the scenes’ or ‘conspiring with her to get him in trouble for the recording.’ That could not be further from the truth. I didn’t even know he had recorded her until after she already knew about it herself. I wasn’t working with her, plotting with her, or communicating with her about it. She and I have always been friendly, but we didn’t even discuss the recording until it started leaking and Joe Flipperhead went feral on Twitter. Meanwhile, Aidan spent weeks screaming at me, accusing me of being some kind of secret double agent, like he was trying to create the betrayal he was terrified of. Almost a self-fulfilling prophecy. And here’s the reality: in the last few weeks, after he’s gone fully scorched earth on me, I have talked to her, and I support her 100%. The things he’s done to her over the past couple years, and the way he twisted it all for his followers, is the exact same manipulation I lived through. I’m not going into her details because that’s her story to tell… but let’s just say I have a feeling you’ll be hearing it sooner rather than later. The lie that Aidan never wanted this to be public is just laughable at this point. Who are we kidding? He's been foaming at the mouth for months to make this content where he can play the victim, as usual. And since this week has apparently become “Let’s All Fixate on Meredith Week,” let me address the content-creator sideshow, too. Some of you are strangers, while some I actually considered my friends. It’s shocking but not shocking how quickly you all flip a switch and follow your captain’s orders. Ray from Dallas spent his Sunday foaming at the mouth in a hostile little video about me, all bark, no substance. I saw it. I’m not intimidated. Mostly, I’m embarrassed for you. Then there’s Will, who’s gone on multiple streams calling me “crazy” and pretending he’s scared of me, despite me being nothing but nice to him. Why? Because he thinks I was the first one to tell Karen he heard the recording, which he absolutely did (unless Aidan is lying about who he played it for, but we know he’s actually telling the truth on this for once). She was informed of it the very next day, which is why she called you and you know this. This was two full days before I was even aware of a call at all. Will, for someone with your track record, maybe sit the “women are dangerous” narrative out. You’re not fooling anyone. I’m staring at 15 pages of police reports and no, it’s not all “things you’ve owned up for in the past”. You know this. Again, I’d take a very large seat here. And my personal favorite-Auntie Deb, who decided to spice up his Spaces on Thanksgiving by accusing me of distributing revenge p*rn with zero evidence, zero screenshots, zero anything. Accusing me of killing a turtle yesterday. A completely fabricated felony tossed around like it’s gossip hour at the bingo hall. Considering your own professional history, James, I’d hope you of all people would understand how catastrophic false accusations can be, but apparently not. I wonder if you’ll have that same enthusiasm when the topic is you. TBD. I’ll wait for that retraction about revenge p*rn, animal abuse, etc. Ball’s in your court hun. And of course, there’s Jessica Machado, who’s been grinding this axe for months like it’s her full-time personality. Hos long did you cry when Chelsea beat you to the punch with that video? Don’t worry hun, there’s more but she didn’t post it because it’s not great for your fairytale. Since you reported my last post, I'll leave the rest up for your imagination. You’ve been so obsessed with me for so long that you can’t even keep your own narratives straight anymore. I love this so much for you. Let me be crystal clear–I am done being all of your punching bag. You love to spin this narrative that I’m this dangerous person. You’d think you’d lay off from constantly f*cking with me if you truly believed that. I would genuinely love for this nonsense to stop. But that requires ALL of you to stop manufacturing drama, stop lying, and stop weaponizing made-up crimes for clicks. And if they want to keep going? I’ve got plenty of content for many seasons to come.

The old M can’t come to the phone right now

45,160 просмотров • 9 месяцев назад

Is writing quality subjective or objective? Of course, taste is personal and writers hate rules, but the more you read, the more you see the same patterns everywhere. Michael Dean has scored 100s of essays on 27 different metrics. He says we can use AI not to automate writing, but to elevate it. Here’s what we talked about: 1) You can’t develop good taste without knowing the fundamentals of your genre. These 27 patterns across all essays are not rules, but questions. Once you understand the constraints, you can break them creatively. 2) The best way to get good at writing is to change how you read. Don’t just read for content. Highlight the parts that resonate, and then deconstruct the voice and structure. 3) Storytelling is about stretching the unknown across time. 4) Great titles do triple duty: they create mystery, distill your thesis, and use phonetics that roll off the tongue. 'Pride and Prejudice' succeeds on all counts, while 'English Aristocracy' falls flat. 5) Get feedback by asking readers what they love and hate. Everyone knows to rework the parts people hate, but don't forget about the other invisible enemy: boredom. Beware of the parts people are indifferent to. Forgettable sections are the enemy of good writing, and no reaction is a bad reaction. 6) The ultimate goal of writing advice is to forget it. Good practice brings you fluency. People romanticize the Grateful Dead as an emblem of free-spirited intuition, but nobody talks about their insane work ethic. Young Jerry Garcia practiced banjo scales for 10 hours a day. Phil Lesh studied classical music theory for trumpet. They kicked out Bob Weir for not being rigorous enough and he had to work his way back into the band. By going into your head, you can get out of your head. 7) A good hook is a fractal. A hook isn’t just a clever way to intrigue a reader, it should capture the core dilemma of your essay. Understand the questions your writing answers, and then bake those questions into the subtext of your opening. 8) Personal writing involves the biographical details of your life. Could somebody put their name on your essay and get away with it? If so, you’re not on the page. 9) Personal writing has 3 criteria: biography (what happened), interiority (what you thought), and outlook (what you believe). It’s not about pushing these to their extremes, but having them work together to support your main idea. 10) To find your voice, change your arena. The way we shape language is linked to our environment. You’ll speak differently to a 5,000-person audience than to your five best friends. You’re more likely to experiment when the stakes and visibility are low. Consider an unlisted page on your website. Or consider a pseudonym (Fernando Pessoa had 75 of them). 11) Write about less: A student once asked Umberto Eco for advice about how to write a thesis. He wanted to write about all the volcanoes in the world. Eco told him to narrow it down. How about all the active volcanoes in the world? Nope, there are 48 of them. Get more specific. “Okay, how about the Popocatépetl Volcano in Mexico?” Okay, that works. Pick one volcano and focus on that. 12) We should prepare for AI to get better than we can imagine. If AI gets “extraterrestrially good,” becomes hyper relevant, and can replicate us to uncanny degrees—will you still write your own sentences? If the answer is yes, you don’t need to panic every time a new model comes out. By imagining the extremes, it helps you understand the timeless parts of the practice. 13) AI's ability to help you write is constrained by how much information you give it. Michael says: “The more you write, the more personal and aligned the replica can be.” 14) Write your first draft for yourself, and write your second draft for your reader. 15) Paragraphs are the atomic unit of composition. We are traumatized by The Five Paragraph Essay and need better heuristics. Each paragraph can start with a frame to hook the reader and end with a reward. Do it over and over again, and you'll get a Reader's Trance. 16) By learning to write essays, you become a Writing Generalist. Most genres specialize, but the essay is a medium of fusion. It combines the soul of a memoirist, the rigor of a philosopher, the pen of a poet, the persuasion of a marketer, the research of a journalist, and the creativity of a novelist. I've shared the full conversation with Michael Dean below. Of course, you can watch it here, but if you'd like to watch it on YouTube or listen on Apple or Spotify, I've shared those links below.
1:51:30

Is writing quality subjective or objective? Of course, taste is personal and writers hate rules, but the more you read, the more you see the same patterns everywhere. Michael Dean has scored 100s of essays on 27 different metrics. He says we can use AI not to automate writing, but to elevate it. Here’s what we talked about: 1) You can’t develop good taste without knowing the fundamentals of your genre. These 27 patterns across all essays are not rules, but questions. Once you understand the constraints, you can break them creatively. 2) The best way to get good at writing is to change how you read. Don’t just read for content. Highlight the parts that resonate, and then deconstruct the voice and structure. 3) Storytelling is about stretching the unknown across time. 4) Great titles do triple duty: they create mystery, distill your thesis, and use phonetics that roll off the tongue. 'Pride and Prejudice' succeeds on all counts, while 'English Aristocracy' falls flat. 5) Get feedback by asking readers what they love and hate. Everyone knows to rework the parts people hate, but don't forget about the other invisible enemy: boredom. Beware of the parts people are indifferent to. Forgettable sections are the enemy of good writing, and no reaction is a bad reaction. 6) The ultimate goal of writing advice is to forget it. Good practice brings you fluency. People romanticize the Grateful Dead as an emblem of free-spirited intuition, but nobody talks about their insane work ethic. Young Jerry Garcia practiced banjo scales for 10 hours a day. Phil Lesh studied classical music theory for trumpet. They kicked out Bob Weir for not being rigorous enough and he had to work his way back into the band. By going into your head, you can get out of your head. 7) A good hook is a fractal. A hook isn’t just a clever way to intrigue a reader, it should capture the core dilemma of your essay. Understand the questions your writing answers, and then bake those questions into the subtext of your opening. 8) Personal writing involves the biographical details of your life. Could somebody put their name on your essay and get away with it? If so, you’re not on the page. 9) Personal writing has 3 criteria: biography (what happened), interiority (what you thought), and outlook (what you believe). It’s not about pushing these to their extremes, but having them work together to support your main idea. 10) To find your voice, change your arena. The way we shape language is linked to our environment. You’ll speak differently to a 5,000-person audience than to your five best friends. You’re more likely to experiment when the stakes and visibility are low. Consider an unlisted page on your website. Or consider a pseudonym (Fernando Pessoa had 75 of them). 11) Write about less: A student once asked Umberto Eco for advice about how to write a thesis. He wanted to write about all the volcanoes in the world. Eco told him to narrow it down. How about all the active volcanoes in the world? Nope, there are 48 of them. Get more specific. “Okay, how about the Popocatépetl Volcano in Mexico?” Okay, that works. Pick one volcano and focus on that. 12) We should prepare for AI to get better than we can imagine. If AI gets “extraterrestrially good,” becomes hyper relevant, and can replicate us to uncanny degrees—will you still write your own sentences? If the answer is yes, you don’t need to panic every time a new model comes out. By imagining the extremes, it helps you understand the timeless parts of the practice. 13) AI's ability to help you write is constrained by how much information you give it. Michael says: “The more you write, the more personal and aligned the replica can be.” 14) Write your first draft for yourself, and write your second draft for your reader. 15) Paragraphs are the atomic unit of composition. We are traumatized by The Five Paragraph Essay and need better heuristics. Each paragraph can start with a frame to hook the reader and end with a reward. Do it over and over again, and you'll get a Reader's Trance. 16) By learning to write essays, you become a Writing Generalist. Most genres specialize, but the essay is a medium of fusion. It combines the soul of a memoirist, the rigor of a philosopher, the pen of a poet, the persuasion of a marketer, the research of a journalist, and the creativity of a novelist. I've shared the full conversation with Michael Dean below. Of course, you can watch it here, but if you'd like to watch it on YouTube or listen on Apple or Spotify, I've shared those links below.

David Perell

90,922 просмотров • 1 год назад

Oh sweetheart… I really hoped we wouldn’t have to do this. Especially on Thanksgiving Eve. But since you’ve decided to publicly rewrite history with your little meltdown today, buckle up. We’re taking a field trip into the saga of one of the many bargain-bin ratchets my ex cheated on me with. Let’s begin. Back in May, YOU Chelsea slid into my Facebook messages out of nowhere (Screen Recording 1), foaming at the mouth because you thought I sent you a friend request. I have over 2,000 pending requests. If I accidentally tapped yours while scrolling, congratulations on the high point of your decade. Your hostile meltdown over a friend request was… honestly, a medical red flag. So I blocked you. Naturally, you slithered over to Twitter next (Screen Recording 2) because you were blocked on Facebook. At this point I’m thinking, “Why is this woman obsessed with me over a friend request?” I’d asked my friends if they knew you, they had no clue. I asked Aidan if he knew who you were. Aidan told me you were just a fan, a nobody. I asked why you’d send me these weird messages, “He has a lot of crazy fans and gets tons of crazy messages,” he said. And wow, did you prove that correct. I blocked you there too. End of story… until it wasn’t. Fast forward to June 18. I discovered you were sexting Aidan in April during a break we had. Gross, but whatever. We stayed together a bit longer before officially breaking up in July. A week later, an account magically appears: Mere’s Diary. Posting vomit about me and the breakup, a breakup nobody knew about yet. And who was this brand-new hate account tagging? Your tiny burner account. The one with no followers. That nobody else could possibly know existed. What an incredible coincidence. Almost miraculous. And like divine intervention, the account vanished the second it was brought to Aidan’s attention. Shocking. Fast-forward to today, I finish work, and here you are– proudly teaming up with the Ratchet Voldemort Squad, posting random screenshots, private conversations, and whatever scraps Aidan tossed you to weaponize against me. Cute hobby. And the icing? I checked my spam folder and found more messages from you on 11/6/25 at 4:04 AM (Screen Recording 3), threatening to “be your worst fucking nightmare.” You know what’s really scary? Your sleep schedule. Yet somehow I’m the one being accused of stalking YOU? Girl. You can’t even lie convincingly. Let’s talk about these “unknown calls”: Let’s see actual proof you received them, because you should absolutely be contacting police if someone is allegedly calling you thousands of times. Way more effective than sending deranged 4am threats that sat in my spam folder til today. Show proof I had anything to do with them. Spoiler: you can’t. Because I didn’t. And because you’re lying. The extent of my communications with you is right here in the screen recordings. That’s it. That’s the whole story. Everything else is just your delusion dressed up as content. Let me recap this for the people in the back: • YOU messaged ME first, unprovoked. • YOU harassed me over a friend request I probably tapped by accident. • YOU made a fake account about me to tag YOURSELF with. • YOU have been switching accounts like it’s a buy-one-get-one special. • And now YOU are doing Aidan’s dirty work, because apparently you’re ratchet #3 in the rotation this week. I’ve never publicly discussed Aidan’s cheating because, unlike you, I have dignity. Despite all the one-sided screenshots that have leaked, painting a very inaccurate picture of a private relationship, I haven't shared any of his messages or fought back. But since one of the Dollar Tree side chicks is now trying to rewrite my life for clout, here we are. I hope people are starting to realize that I’m not the one instigating any of this as I’d really rather keep private things private. Almost like this little “Temu Storm” of gutter muppets is coordinated on behalf of someone who wants to paint himself as the victim. I offered to “take that walk” with the ratchet who eats paper and the ratchet who suddenly became beloved this week after faking rape for a year, but apparently they sent the understudy instead. Anyway, Chelsea—keep posting your random, context-free screenshots. Keep playing the victim. Keep pretending you’re being terrorized by someone who doesn’t even have your phone number. But before you claim 2,000 calls again, maybe — just maybe — show a single shred of proof. I’ll wait, bitch. PS-I feel like tonight is the perfect time to premiere Jess’s new video. Spoiler alert- it’ll be way better than the one Kate made.
0:23

Oh sweetheart… I really hoped we wouldn’t have to do this. Especially on Thanksgiving Eve. But since you’ve decided to publicly rewrite history with your little meltdown today, buckle up. We’re taking a field trip into the saga of one of the many bargain-bin ratchets my ex cheated on me with. Let’s begin. Back in May, YOU Chelsea slid into my Facebook messages out of nowhere (Screen Recording 1), foaming at the mouth because you thought I sent you a friend request. I have over 2,000 pending requests. If I accidentally tapped yours while scrolling, congratulations on the high point of your decade. Your hostile meltdown over a friend request was… honestly, a medical red flag. So I blocked you. Naturally, you slithered over to Twitter next (Screen Recording 2) because you were blocked on Facebook. At this point I’m thinking, “Why is this woman obsessed with me over a friend request?” I’d asked my friends if they knew you, they had no clue. I asked Aidan if he knew who you were. Aidan told me you were just a fan, a nobody. I asked why you’d send me these weird messages, “He has a lot of crazy fans and gets tons of crazy messages,” he said. And wow, did you prove that correct. I blocked you there too. End of story… until it wasn’t. Fast forward to June 18. I discovered you were sexting Aidan in April during a break we had. Gross, but whatever. We stayed together a bit longer before officially breaking up in July. A week later, an account magically appears: Mere’s Diary. Posting vomit about me and the breakup, a breakup nobody knew about yet. And who was this brand-new hate account tagging? Your tiny burner account. The one with no followers. That nobody else could possibly know existed. What an incredible coincidence. Almost miraculous. And like divine intervention, the account vanished the second it was brought to Aidan’s attention. Shocking. Fast-forward to today, I finish work, and here you are– proudly teaming up with the Ratchet Voldemort Squad, posting random screenshots, private conversations, and whatever scraps Aidan tossed you to weaponize against me. Cute hobby. And the icing? I checked my spam folder and found more messages from you on 11/6/25 at 4:04 AM (Screen Recording 3), threatening to “be your worst fucking nightmare.” You know what’s really scary? Your sleep schedule. Yet somehow I’m the one being accused of stalking YOU? Girl. You can’t even lie convincingly. Let’s talk about these “unknown calls”: Let’s see actual proof you received them, because you should absolutely be contacting police if someone is allegedly calling you thousands of times. Way more effective than sending deranged 4am threats that sat in my spam folder til today. Show proof I had anything to do with them. Spoiler: you can’t. Because I didn’t. And because you’re lying. The extent of my communications with you is right here in the screen recordings. That’s it. That’s the whole story. Everything else is just your delusion dressed up as content. Let me recap this for the people in the back: • YOU messaged ME first, unprovoked. • YOU harassed me over a friend request I probably tapped by accident. • YOU made a fake account about me to tag YOURSELF with. • YOU have been switching accounts like it’s a buy-one-get-one special. • And now YOU are doing Aidan’s dirty work, because apparently you’re ratchet #3 in the rotation this week. I’ve never publicly discussed Aidan’s cheating because, unlike you, I have dignity. Despite all the one-sided screenshots that have leaked, painting a very inaccurate picture of a private relationship, I haven't shared any of his messages or fought back. But since one of the Dollar Tree side chicks is now trying to rewrite my life for clout, here we are. I hope people are starting to realize that I’m not the one instigating any of this as I’d really rather keep private things private. Almost like this little “Temu Storm” of gutter muppets is coordinated on behalf of someone who wants to paint himself as the victim. I offered to “take that walk” with the ratchet who eats paper and the ratchet who suddenly became beloved this week after faking rape for a year, but apparently they sent the understudy instead. Anyway, Chelsea—keep posting your random, context-free screenshots. Keep playing the victim. Keep pretending you’re being terrorized by someone who doesn’t even have your phone number. But before you claim 2,000 calls again, maybe — just maybe — show a single shred of proof. I’ll wait, bitch. PS-I feel like tonight is the perfect time to premiere Jess’s new video. Spoiler alert- it’ll be way better than the one Kate made.

Meredith

1,196,426 просмотров • 9 месяцев назад

💥 LAP Alert 💥 "I did this sort of spy thing where I changed hotel rooms and I changed taxis. I was making sure I wasn’t followed." ~Knapp Is Lacatski Lying to Us About the Craft and Breaching the Hull? ~ "If not for that [2017 NYT] story about AATIP and the problems that [Lacatski] saw with it, he would never have mentioned [AAWSAP]...I don't think, ever." ~Knapp (So, in other words...thank you from the UFO community, to the NYT, for getting it wrong? 🙂) ~ Jeremy Kenyon Lockyer Corbell: "Should we listen to Dr. James Lacatski on UFOs, on the fact, or the idea, that our government has at least one, he's admitted, and we breached the hull? Should we listen to him, George?" George Knapp: "I know a lot of people have noticed that he's talked about his role in counterintelligence as part of the AAWSAP program. And because they equate counterintelligence with lies, false info., cover stories, misdirection. Aha! He's putting out a bunch of false info. a decade after he retired from government service." (I saw one person suggest that, and I thought it was a questionable take...) Grant Lavac: "Given that Dr. James Lacatski was the 'counterintelligence coordinator' for AAWSAP, how much confidence can we invest in the veracity of his public statements that 'at least one recovered craft of unknown origin, a flying machine with no wings, no engine, no fuel, and no fuel tanks' is in the possession of the US government and that they had 'breached the hull' of the UFO? In the context of the counterintelligence value of UAP/UFO, his comments in this most recent interview on WEAPONIZED (edited for brevity) only raise more questions for me." ~~~ Knapp: "A, it's not [Lacatski]. He's not out there beating the bushes. He's talked to us, but that's pretty much it. He's telling the full story as much as he can in a series of books. And I was co-author on two of those, not on this one. And, you know, I remember the first time I met him, it was in 2018." ~ (In April of 2019, Knapp shared that story, minus Lacatski's name, at UFO MegaCon. Knapp in 2019: "I thought today I would share with you, sort of the informational foundation that I’ve acquired. So, one year ago, I made this trip to Washington, D.C. at the invitation of Senator Harry Reid. It was St. Patrick’s Day, 2018 and I already knew a little bit about AATIP and AAWSAP and what they’ve been studying and where the money came from and how the program was created. I did this sort of spy thing where I changed hotel rooms and I changed taxis. I was making sure I wasn’t followed. And if there was ever actually, anybody following me, they must have thought I looked ridiculous because it was way over the top. "But I ended up having to meet with Senator Reid and some other people who were directly involved in these programs and they gave me a download. And I thought I knew a lot about these programs when I went there and realized that I only knew a little tiny bit. The purpose of this was to learn about these programs. We all know about AATIP, but in reality, there was something before that. "I sat down for a couple of hours with Senator Reid and other people whose names, they don’t want to be known. They brought me up to speed on how AATIP was created. How its predecessor was under way for a number of years. It coexisted for a long time. People in this room. People who investigate this topic may have suspected for a long time that there was some kind of a program that still existed. We’ve all heard that Project Bluebook was the end. 1969 it ended and the government was done with UFOs. They closed up shop. And the reason they closed it down is because there was no evidence that it involved national security. "And we all knew that was baloney because of the stories that we’ve seen that are really well documented. For example, UFOs over nuclear missile bases. UFO encounters with the military installations and atomic facilities. Things of that sort the have been well documented over the years. There are cases that involved national security. So at the end of Blue Book, of course, this memo said, alright, any cases involving national security will continue to be investigated in the regular way. Well, what the heck was the regular way? We didn’t know. Well now we do know. At least a little bit of it." (Project Blue Book was shut down in December of 1969, but a few months earlier, in October, we had the Bolender memo, which noted that "reports of UFOs which could affect national security should continue to be handled through the standard Air Force procedure designed for this purpose." What standard Air Force procedure? The regular way? Where did those cases go? We still don't know what Bolender was referring to in that memo.) ~ Knapp in 2019: "And one of the regular ways was this program called AATIP. So I went on this trip. [and] I learned this stuff about AATIP. I had known a lot about it before but I got this briefing about this alphabet soup of different programs, how they began and what they studied. December 2017, the New York Times breaks this story about AATIP. Now, I had known about it for a long time because I lived in Las Vegas. I knew Bob Bigelow. I knew Harry Reid. We’d talk about UFO stuff and what was going on. "So when I was told the New York Times was gonna break the story, I’m kind ticked off about it. Because hey, I’ve been sitting on this for a long time. Why don’t I get to break the story? And they had to, one after another, gently remind me, 'You know. You’re not the New York Times.' Which I had to admit! It was true. And if I had done the story, the Times had said that they weren’t going to do it if somebody else breaks it. So, if I had done it, it’d be another story from a UFO reporter. "The New York Times did it and they changed everything. Because they did it, wider organizations did it. Some of them took shots at the New York Times because The Times got the story and they didn’t. But that story was accurate, to a degree. But the story that it told was not the full story. AATIP, that we know about…the AATIP that studies nuts and bolts saucers…case of UFOs that have encounters with military units such as the USS Nimitz, that is studied by a group of people, Lue Elizondo was the head of it. "It’s not so much a program as it was a loose network of intelligence officials in different agencies, including the Air Force and the Navy, CIA, DIA, DARPA…there might be a couple of other agencies. But a case would come in from any one of their units [and] it would be shared with this group of people, analysis would be done, evidence would be looked at and then stashed in a draw and nobody ever sees it. It’s not passed up the chain of command. "In 2007, that changed. One of the guys (Lacatski. ~Joe 2025) I met with in this meeting in Washington is the one who changed it. He had been in the same position that Lue Elizondo had been in. And his name is just not out there. He grew frustrated with what was happening with the phenomenon and he suspected that UFOs flying around the sky, buzzing our military units every once in a while, is not the full story. Even if you could solve that part of the mystery it wouldn’t solve the bigger part of the picture. "So he grew interested in Skinwalker Ranch and he had read the (Knapp/Kelleher – 'Hunt For The Skinwalker') book. And after he read it, he called up Bob Bigelow and said…actually, he wrote him a letter and said, 'Hey, can I go to the ranch…go look around? I’m with the DIA.' Bigelow says, 'Come on out to Las Vegas and I’ll take you there.' And that’s what happened. He flew to Las Vegas. They flew on Bigelow’s jet. They went to the ranch. "This guy’s not there fifteen minutes and he has an experience. And I’m not gonna go into detail. I’m hoping that he’s going to maybe come forward at some point and describe his experience. But it was just for him. Of all the people in this room, in the encounter, he was the only one who could see it. He’s the only one who had an angle on this thing that appeared. And he’s pretending that he’s not seeing it but it’s right out of the corner of his eye. And he doesn’t say anything until he leaves the ranch. And he gets off and he asks Bigelow if he had seen it. And he had not. The other people who had been in the room had not seen it. "He flies back to Las Vegas, goes back to Washington, D.C. and looks up Harry Reid and tells him about it. Now Reid had some experience in these matters that I’ll get into in a little bit. But as a result of that conversation, Reid, who had an interest in UFOs and had maintained that interest over many years – and I can attest to that personally – called in a couple of his friends in the Senate – Daniel Inouye and Ted Stevens. They had a conversation in a secure room and they decided to provide some funding for a much broader study. Something that looked at…beyond flying saucers, that looked at other paranormal aspects…supernatural aspects that we would not normally associate with aliens or ETs. Assuming that that’s what this is, which I’m not sure anyone knows for sure. And that is how AAWSAP was born. The Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program." ~~~ Knapp Yesterday: "The only reason [Lacatski] came forward, he was ticked off about how AATIP had been described in major media reports, and no mention had been given to the actual, real program. That one that had a $22 million budget, lasted 27 months, and which put together the biggest UFO data warehouse in history, that had written all these papers that still have not been released." (In the most-recent interview (Part 1) with Weaponized, Lacatski let it fly with his issues related to the 2017 NYT article: "The initial reporting...by the New York Times story in 2017 was totally inaccurate. Contrary to what some people claim, the authors knew my name and position at AAWSAP, yet never attempted to contact me. Likewise, the The Washington Post. POLITICO (laughs) contacted me within hours after the articles were published in the free publications, asking for my opinion. They knew my name, they had my phone number. Why didn't they contact me [beforehand]?" ~Dr. James Lacatski on Weaponized ~ Knapp: "So, Jim was a counterintelligence guy for AAWSAP, but in this role. He wasn't putting out cover stories or lies, he didn't put out anything. The world didn't hear that AAWSAP existed until years later, at least by that name. There was one statement made to the press about that program. It was by Robert Bigelow, whose company, BAASS, got the contract. A week after he signed it, he came on with me on Coast to Coast AM and said, 'We got this program dealing with UFOs, we have an unnamed partner, and we're excited to get going.' That was it. "Jim Lacatski wasn't putting out PR releases about AAWSAP. There was nothing. That was the last thing anybody said until the New York Times did the AATIP story, and then Jim Lacatski felt the real story was being covered up. If not for that story about AATIP and the problems that he saw with it, he would never have mentioned this. I don't think ever." (Well, then, thank you to the NYT journalists and editors for pissing off Lacatski!) Knapp: "You'll recall, AAWSAP, at the time that things went downhill, that the funding was moved away, they were trying to make it into a SAP, a Special Access Program. And if it had happened, we probably would never have heard of it. If it had happened, Lue Elizondo would have been the counterintelligence guy for AAWSAP, that he had already talked to Lacatski. "But Lacatski is not proclaiming the greatness of the program. He's not out there beating the bushes on podcasts and newscasts, other than with us, and he never put out in counterintelligence. His role, counterintelligence, meant something different for AAWSAP. The thing that DIA had told him was, 'Look, you know, it's not a rogue program. I know it gets weird into some of the phenomena that was at Skinwalker Ranch and other places. We don't care. Here's what we care about: Don't let the secret out. We don't want to see this on the front page of the Washington Post. We want it kept secret.' (John Greenewald was one person questioning whether AAWSAP was actually a prosaic program and Lacatski just decided to go rogue with a foray into UFOs and the paranormal.) Greenewald Tweet: "Did the U.S. government really sanction this, and if so, is this really how it was run? Or was this a rogue operation by a select few on the inside playing with Uncle Sam's coffers?" (Greenewald was quote tweeting a Greenstreet hit-piece video on AAWSAP. In his interview on Weaponized aired over the past few weeks, Lacatski said that former Deputy Director of AARO, Tim Phillips, also used the "rogue" word when describing AAWSAP. Did DIA really not know what AAWSAP was about? Did Lacatski go rogue and turn a program that was supposed to look at prosaic, advanced technology into one that studied UFOs and the paranormal? Here's an exchange from the 2023 interview Knapp and Corbell did with Lacatski and Colm Kelleher.) Kelleher: "The critical part of AAWSAP that we tried to convey in 'Skinwalkers at the Pentagon,' was that there were two fundamental, parallel tracks that AAWSAP ran on. The first one was the examination of UFO performance. And, you know, the UFO performance part was getting all of the data from eyewitnesses, plus deploying sensors into the field, in order to gather data on the performance of UFOs. That was track number one. And track number two was: What effects do UFOs have on humans? That was a parallel track that, from the get go, AAWSAP decided, unambiguously, to run both tracks in parallel. We documented psychological effects, and then we also documented paranormal effects." Lacatski: "Anything can be said on the internet it seems, factual or not. Well, one thing that is not factual is, DIA knew what it was getting into in regard to both aspects that Colm just described to you. And let me end my statement right here. We had no choice but to pursue both aspects." (That was a poor way of him saying: The claim that DIA was unaware of AAWSAP looking into all aspects of UFOs, including the paranormal, is NOT true.) Lacatski: "I want to emphasize something I said on my first and only interview. It was a closed program. It operated very similar to a SAP. The director, the director of analysis, and my office chief...and, of course, division chief, knew about this program. No one else did. Now, I was also protected by the stovepipe nature of that. I did not have to address political-type questions. I was insulated, but they were, too. There was no one else. People in the surrounding cubicles didn't know. Nothing was purposely being hid. It was a closed, stovepipe system, and it needed to be. It needed to be operated that way." ~~~ Knapp: "And so, Jim Lacatski took it on himself, put it in his own hands. He and Colm Kelleher interviewed all these people who applied for the jobs, the 50 full-time positions that they staffed, in a matter of months. They did background checks, they required security clearances for all those people, and they were worried about leaks. They didn't want information to get out. "They also were concerned about espionage by foreign players, by foreign companies, things of that sort. And some of that really did happen. As Jim has shared with us, there were a couple of phones that were transmitters that were found inside Bigelow Aerospace, inside the Bigelow, uh, facilities, and it was very alarming because they weren't sure who was doing it. I think they think it was a foreign government. I'm not going to say which one, uh, they suspected the most." (Lacatski said that the phones in question were made in China.) Knapp: "But, and then they also found weird frequencies emanating from Skinwalker Ranch. That's not strange, and there's a lot of unusual stuff that happens there, but it was some sort of a an espionage program that they believed was was not only looking at the ranch, but also at BAASS. "That was his primary concern. He was worried that the story gets out, because secrecy was of paramount interest to the heads of DIA and he's worried about the information getting out to the public. Because once it happened, then the knives come out in the Pentagon and within the intelligence community, which is kind of what happened. A memo was sent from Harry Reid's office, let other people know that AAWSAP existed, and that's when things started getting problematic." Corbell: "The bugging thing. So, it's not just like Bigelow Aerospace was tapped with something, he said, specifically, AAWSAP, right? So they were looking at that new UFO program. And I don't know how public this is, but he did say it was - not just him, other people have all said - it was multiple nations, multiple, different devices from those phones. And he also said that they worked with FBI, they had FBI liaisons looking at the ranch property, and also at Bigelow Aerospace. "Because, remember, they were supposed to receive a transfer of materials. That's why they reverse, reverse engineered (laughs), you know, they built everything to be able to hold SCIF-capable and material-capable property at that classification level. So, look, I think if we pull it back, the whole idea is, James Lacatski made a statement at some point that he was, you know, head of, or part of, or running the counterintelligence for AAWSAP. But his point was to keep AAWSAP itself secret from foreign nations. So then he has to keep it secret from the U.S. He did it. He did a great job. They actually kept it secret. That doesn't mean he's going out and creating false information to the public like he's been accused of. "So, should we listen to Jim Lacatski? That was like, you know, the main question. Oh, one second. He also identified that there is currently a counter-programming, counterintelligence operation going on to the American public, but not against the American public, by AARO." (In other words, spread misinformation to the American public so they can advance their goal of misinforming and confusing our adversaries who are always listening. National security! IMO, that's only acceptable if we're talking specifics related to propulsion, technology and weapons that can be used to give us a leg up on said adversaries. But everything else should come out and be made public. We shouldn't be told a bunch of lies about information we paid for and that could, potentially, give us some clarity about our species and other lifeforms on this planet.) Corbell: That was so clear in our interview with him that he said that, you know, 'Look, they're acting this way. They are telling you lies about AAWSAP and what happened.' And that's why he said, 'My books, I'm a government employee. This was paid by taxpayers. I'm trying to give you information.' And that's what his books are. "So it's clear from these rounds of interviews that we just had with Dr. Lacatski that he supports a controlled UFO disclosure. He made that very clear. So should we listen to what he has to say? I mean, he was a big dog, right, George?" Knapp: "He was the head of the largest U.S. government-funded UFO investigation in history, that we know of. He worked with Colm Kelleher, who was the boots-on-the-ground guy in Las Vegas. He worked with Jay Stratton. Stratton's role in the development of AAWSAP has not been really fully explored, but he's got a book coming out at some point, once it gets through the DOPSR process. But then we'll get additional information to buttress what Lacatski has said."
7:17

💥 LAP Alert 💥 "I did this sort of spy thing where I changed hotel rooms and I changed taxis. I was making sure I wasn’t followed." ~Knapp Is Lacatski Lying to Us About the Craft and Breaching the Hull? ~ "If not for that [2017 NYT] story about AATIP and the problems that [Lacatski] saw with it, he would never have mentioned [AAWSAP]...I don't think, ever." ~Knapp (So, in other words...thank you from the UFO community, to the NYT, for getting it wrong? 🙂) ~ Jeremy Kenyon Lockyer Corbell: "Should we listen to Dr. James Lacatski on UFOs, on the fact, or the idea, that our government has at least one, he's admitted, and we breached the hull? Should we listen to him, George?" George Knapp: "I know a lot of people have noticed that he's talked about his role in counterintelligence as part of the AAWSAP program. And because they equate counterintelligence with lies, false info., cover stories, misdirection. Aha! He's putting out a bunch of false info. a decade after he retired from government service." (I saw one person suggest that, and I thought it was a questionable take...) Grant Lavac: "Given that Dr. James Lacatski was the 'counterintelligence coordinator' for AAWSAP, how much confidence can we invest in the veracity of his public statements that 'at least one recovered craft of unknown origin, a flying machine with no wings, no engine, no fuel, and no fuel tanks' is in the possession of the US government and that they had 'breached the hull' of the UFO? In the context of the counterintelligence value of UAP/UFO, his comments in this most recent interview on WEAPONIZED (edited for brevity) only raise more questions for me." ~~~ Knapp: "A, it's not [Lacatski]. He's not out there beating the bushes. He's talked to us, but that's pretty much it. He's telling the full story as much as he can in a series of books. And I was co-author on two of those, not on this one. And, you know, I remember the first time I met him, it was in 2018." ~ (In April of 2019, Knapp shared that story, minus Lacatski's name, at UFO MegaCon. Knapp in 2019: "I thought today I would share with you, sort of the informational foundation that I’ve acquired. So, one year ago, I made this trip to Washington, D.C. at the invitation of Senator Harry Reid. It was St. Patrick’s Day, 2018 and I already knew a little bit about AATIP and AAWSAP and what they’ve been studying and where the money came from and how the program was created. I did this sort of spy thing where I changed hotel rooms and I changed taxis. I was making sure I wasn’t followed. And if there was ever actually, anybody following me, they must have thought I looked ridiculous because it was way over the top. "But I ended up having to meet with Senator Reid and some other people who were directly involved in these programs and they gave me a download. And I thought I knew a lot about these programs when I went there and realized that I only knew a little tiny bit. The purpose of this was to learn about these programs. We all know about AATIP, but in reality, there was something before that. "I sat down for a couple of hours with Senator Reid and other people whose names, they don’t want to be known. They brought me up to speed on how AATIP was created. How its predecessor was under way for a number of years. It coexisted for a long time. People in this room. People who investigate this topic may have suspected for a long time that there was some kind of a program that still existed. We’ve all heard that Project Bluebook was the end. 1969 it ended and the government was done with UFOs. They closed up shop. And the reason they closed it down is because there was no evidence that it involved national security. "And we all knew that was baloney because of the stories that we’ve seen that are really well documented. For example, UFOs over nuclear missile bases. UFO encounters with the military installations and atomic facilities. Things of that sort the have been well documented over the years. There are cases that involved national security. So at the end of Blue Book, of course, this memo said, alright, any cases involving national security will continue to be investigated in the regular way. Well, what the heck was the regular way? We didn’t know. Well now we do know. At least a little bit of it." (Project Blue Book was shut down in December of 1969, but a few months earlier, in October, we had the Bolender memo, which noted that "reports of UFOs which could affect national security should continue to be handled through the standard Air Force procedure designed for this purpose." What standard Air Force procedure? The regular way? Where did those cases go? We still don't know what Bolender was referring to in that memo.) ~ Knapp in 2019: "And one of the regular ways was this program called AATIP. So I went on this trip. [and] I learned this stuff about AATIP. I had known a lot about it before but I got this briefing about this alphabet soup of different programs, how they began and what they studied. December 2017, the New York Times breaks this story about AATIP. Now, I had known about it for a long time because I lived in Las Vegas. I knew Bob Bigelow. I knew Harry Reid. We’d talk about UFO stuff and what was going on. "So when I was told the New York Times was gonna break the story, I’m kind ticked off about it. Because hey, I’ve been sitting on this for a long time. Why don’t I get to break the story? And they had to, one after another, gently remind me, 'You know. You’re not the New York Times.' Which I had to admit! It was true. And if I had done the story, the Times had said that they weren’t going to do it if somebody else breaks it. So, if I had done it, it’d be another story from a UFO reporter. "The New York Times did it and they changed everything. Because they did it, wider organizations did it. Some of them took shots at the New York Times because The Times got the story and they didn’t. But that story was accurate, to a degree. But the story that it told was not the full story. AATIP, that we know about…the AATIP that studies nuts and bolts saucers…case of UFOs that have encounters with military units such as the USS Nimitz, that is studied by a group of people, Lue Elizondo was the head of it. "It’s not so much a program as it was a loose network of intelligence officials in different agencies, including the Air Force and the Navy, CIA, DIA, DARPA…there might be a couple of other agencies. But a case would come in from any one of their units [and] it would be shared with this group of people, analysis would be done, evidence would be looked at and then stashed in a draw and nobody ever sees it. It’s not passed up the chain of command. "In 2007, that changed. One of the guys (Lacatski. ~Joe 2025) I met with in this meeting in Washington is the one who changed it. He had been in the same position that Lue Elizondo had been in. And his name is just not out there. He grew frustrated with what was happening with the phenomenon and he suspected that UFOs flying around the sky, buzzing our military units every once in a while, is not the full story. Even if you could solve that part of the mystery it wouldn’t solve the bigger part of the picture. "So he grew interested in Skinwalker Ranch and he had read the (Knapp/Kelleher – 'Hunt For The Skinwalker') book. And after he read it, he called up Bob Bigelow and said…actually, he wrote him a letter and said, 'Hey, can I go to the ranch…go look around? I’m with the DIA.' Bigelow says, 'Come on out to Las Vegas and I’ll take you there.' And that’s what happened. He flew to Las Vegas. They flew on Bigelow’s jet. They went to the ranch. "This guy’s not there fifteen minutes and he has an experience. And I’m not gonna go into detail. I’m hoping that he’s going to maybe come forward at some point and describe his experience. But it was just for him. Of all the people in this room, in the encounter, he was the only one who could see it. He’s the only one who had an angle on this thing that appeared. And he’s pretending that he’s not seeing it but it’s right out of the corner of his eye. And he doesn’t say anything until he leaves the ranch. And he gets off and he asks Bigelow if he had seen it. And he had not. The other people who had been in the room had not seen it. "He flies back to Las Vegas, goes back to Washington, D.C. and looks up Harry Reid and tells him about it. Now Reid had some experience in these matters that I’ll get into in a little bit. But as a result of that conversation, Reid, who had an interest in UFOs and had maintained that interest over many years – and I can attest to that personally – called in a couple of his friends in the Senate – Daniel Inouye and Ted Stevens. They had a conversation in a secure room and they decided to provide some funding for a much broader study. Something that looked at…beyond flying saucers, that looked at other paranormal aspects…supernatural aspects that we would not normally associate with aliens or ETs. Assuming that that’s what this is, which I’m not sure anyone knows for sure. And that is how AAWSAP was born. The Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program." ~~~ Knapp Yesterday: "The only reason [Lacatski] came forward, he was ticked off about how AATIP had been described in major media reports, and no mention had been given to the actual, real program. That one that had a $22 million budget, lasted 27 months, and which put together the biggest UFO data warehouse in history, that had written all these papers that still have not been released." (In the most-recent interview (Part 1) with Weaponized, Lacatski let it fly with his issues related to the 2017 NYT article: "The initial reporting...by the New York Times story in 2017 was totally inaccurate. Contrary to what some people claim, the authors knew my name and position at AAWSAP, yet never attempted to contact me. Likewise, the The Washington Post. POLITICO (laughs) contacted me within hours after the articles were published in the free publications, asking for my opinion. They knew my name, they had my phone number. Why didn't they contact me [beforehand]?" ~Dr. James Lacatski on Weaponized ~ Knapp: "So, Jim was a counterintelligence guy for AAWSAP, but in this role. He wasn't putting out cover stories or lies, he didn't put out anything. The world didn't hear that AAWSAP existed until years later, at least by that name. There was one statement made to the press about that program. It was by Robert Bigelow, whose company, BAASS, got the contract. A week after he signed it, he came on with me on Coast to Coast AM and said, 'We got this program dealing with UFOs, we have an unnamed partner, and we're excited to get going.' That was it. "Jim Lacatski wasn't putting out PR releases about AAWSAP. There was nothing. That was the last thing anybody said until the New York Times did the AATIP story, and then Jim Lacatski felt the real story was being covered up. If not for that story about AATIP and the problems that he saw with it, he would never have mentioned this. I don't think ever." (Well, then, thank you to the NYT journalists and editors for pissing off Lacatski!) Knapp: "You'll recall, AAWSAP, at the time that things went downhill, that the funding was moved away, they were trying to make it into a SAP, a Special Access Program. And if it had happened, we probably would never have heard of it. If it had happened, Lue Elizondo would have been the counterintelligence guy for AAWSAP, that he had already talked to Lacatski. "But Lacatski is not proclaiming the greatness of the program. He's not out there beating the bushes on podcasts and newscasts, other than with us, and he never put out in counterintelligence. His role, counterintelligence, meant something different for AAWSAP. The thing that DIA had told him was, 'Look, you know, it's not a rogue program. I know it gets weird into some of the phenomena that was at Skinwalker Ranch and other places. We don't care. Here's what we care about: Don't let the secret out. We don't want to see this on the front page of the Washington Post. We want it kept secret.' (John Greenewald was one person questioning whether AAWSAP was actually a prosaic program and Lacatski just decided to go rogue with a foray into UFOs and the paranormal.) Greenewald Tweet: "Did the U.S. government really sanction this, and if so, is this really how it was run? Or was this a rogue operation by a select few on the inside playing with Uncle Sam's coffers?" (Greenewald was quote tweeting a Greenstreet hit-piece video on AAWSAP. In his interview on Weaponized aired over the past few weeks, Lacatski said that former Deputy Director of AARO, Tim Phillips, also used the "rogue" word when describing AAWSAP. Did DIA really not know what AAWSAP was about? Did Lacatski go rogue and turn a program that was supposed to look at prosaic, advanced technology into one that studied UFOs and the paranormal? Here's an exchange from the 2023 interview Knapp and Corbell did with Lacatski and Colm Kelleher.) Kelleher: "The critical part of AAWSAP that we tried to convey in 'Skinwalkers at the Pentagon,' was that there were two fundamental, parallel tracks that AAWSAP ran on. The first one was the examination of UFO performance. And, you know, the UFO performance part was getting all of the data from eyewitnesses, plus deploying sensors into the field, in order to gather data on the performance of UFOs. That was track number one. And track number two was: What effects do UFOs have on humans? That was a parallel track that, from the get go, AAWSAP decided, unambiguously, to run both tracks in parallel. We documented psychological effects, and then we also documented paranormal effects." Lacatski: "Anything can be said on the internet it seems, factual or not. Well, one thing that is not factual is, DIA knew what it was getting into in regard to both aspects that Colm just described to you. And let me end my statement right here. We had no choice but to pursue both aspects." (That was a poor way of him saying: The claim that DIA was unaware of AAWSAP looking into all aspects of UFOs, including the paranormal, is NOT true.) Lacatski: "I want to emphasize something I said on my first and only interview. It was a closed program. It operated very similar to a SAP. The director, the director of analysis, and my office chief...and, of course, division chief, knew about this program. No one else did. Now, I was also protected by the stovepipe nature of that. I did not have to address political-type questions. I was insulated, but they were, too. There was no one else. People in the surrounding cubicles didn't know. Nothing was purposely being hid. It was a closed, stovepipe system, and it needed to be. It needed to be operated that way." ~~~ Knapp: "And so, Jim Lacatski took it on himself, put it in his own hands. He and Colm Kelleher interviewed all these people who applied for the jobs, the 50 full-time positions that they staffed, in a matter of months. They did background checks, they required security clearances for all those people, and they were worried about leaks. They didn't want information to get out. "They also were concerned about espionage by foreign players, by foreign companies, things of that sort. And some of that really did happen. As Jim has shared with us, there were a couple of phones that were transmitters that were found inside Bigelow Aerospace, inside the Bigelow, uh, facilities, and it was very alarming because they weren't sure who was doing it. I think they think it was a foreign government. I'm not going to say which one, uh, they suspected the most." (Lacatski said that the phones in question were made in China.) Knapp: "But, and then they also found weird frequencies emanating from Skinwalker Ranch. That's not strange, and there's a lot of unusual stuff that happens there, but it was some sort of a an espionage program that they believed was was not only looking at the ranch, but also at BAASS. "That was his primary concern. He was worried that the story gets out, because secrecy was of paramount interest to the heads of DIA and he's worried about the information getting out to the public. Because once it happened, then the knives come out in the Pentagon and within the intelligence community, which is kind of what happened. A memo was sent from Harry Reid's office, let other people know that AAWSAP existed, and that's when things started getting problematic." Corbell: "The bugging thing. So, it's not just like Bigelow Aerospace was tapped with something, he said, specifically, AAWSAP, right? So they were looking at that new UFO program. And I don't know how public this is, but he did say it was - not just him, other people have all said - it was multiple nations, multiple, different devices from those phones. And he also said that they worked with FBI, they had FBI liaisons looking at the ranch property, and also at Bigelow Aerospace. "Because, remember, they were supposed to receive a transfer of materials. That's why they reverse, reverse engineered (laughs), you know, they built everything to be able to hold SCIF-capable and material-capable property at that classification level. So, look, I think if we pull it back, the whole idea is, James Lacatski made a statement at some point that he was, you know, head of, or part of, or running the counterintelligence for AAWSAP. But his point was to keep AAWSAP itself secret from foreign nations. So then he has to keep it secret from the U.S. He did it. He did a great job. They actually kept it secret. That doesn't mean he's going out and creating false information to the public like he's been accused of. "So, should we listen to Jim Lacatski? That was like, you know, the main question. Oh, one second. He also identified that there is currently a counter-programming, counterintelligence operation going on to the American public, but not against the American public, by AARO." (In other words, spread misinformation to the American public so they can advance their goal of misinforming and confusing our adversaries who are always listening. National security! IMO, that's only acceptable if we're talking specifics related to propulsion, technology and weapons that can be used to give us a leg up on said adversaries. But everything else should come out and be made public. We shouldn't be told a bunch of lies about information we paid for and that could, potentially, give us some clarity about our species and other lifeforms on this planet.) Corbell: That was so clear in our interview with him that he said that, you know, 'Look, they're acting this way. They are telling you lies about AAWSAP and what happened.' And that's why he said, 'My books, I'm a government employee. This was paid by taxpayers. I'm trying to give you information.' And that's what his books are. "So it's clear from these rounds of interviews that we just had with Dr. Lacatski that he supports a controlled UFO disclosure. He made that very clear. So should we listen to what he has to say? I mean, he was a big dog, right, George?" Knapp: "He was the head of the largest U.S. government-funded UFO investigation in history, that we know of. He worked with Colm Kelleher, who was the boots-on-the-ground guy in Las Vegas. He worked with Jay Stratton. Stratton's role in the development of AAWSAP has not been really fully explored, but he's got a book coming out at some point, once it gets through the DOPSR process. But then we'll get additional information to buttress what Lacatski has said."

Joe Murgia

56,558 просмотров • 9 месяцев назад

From Creator to Founder: The Rollercoaster Journey of Building Chatter Social Man, what a journey it’s been so far. Four years ago, I was just another creator, spending late nights on Clubhouse during the height of the pandemic. Like so many others, I was searching for connection, for community, for something meaningful. But what I found there wasn’t just connection—it was purpose. Alongside my brother, Jonathan Bing, we built a nightly show that reached over 5 million people. Imagine that: 5 million lives touched by conversations that felt real and unfiltered, all on a platform that at its peak had 10 million monthly active users. Clubhouse was magic. But then the decline began. Watching the platform struggle, I couldn’t help but reflect: what made it great? What went wrong? And what could the future look like if we did things differently? The Spark of Chatter As a content creator, I understood the needs of both creators and users. I knew what excited people, what kept them engaged, and what made them leave. Clubhouse had tapped into something special, but it had missed the mark on scalability and sustainability. By September 2023, I couldn’t stop thinking about the potential for something new—something that brought back the magic of real-time interaction but made it scalable, engaging, and sticky. And so, I set out to build Chatter Social. But I wasn’t a tech founder. I didn’t have a background in software development or a network of Silicon Valley insiders. What I did have was determination and the belief that if I could bring the right people together, we could build something extraordinary. Building the Team The journey to build Chatter started with assembling a team. Through my network from my days on Clubhouse, I found Samir, my first CTO. He believed in the vision and was instrumental in getting the project off the ground. Shortly after, I connected with Tyler, our Head of Design, whose creativity brought life to our ideas. A developer joined us soon after, and we were off to the races. By the end of 2023, Samir had to step away due to other commitments, and we promoted the developer to CTO. At the same time, I brought on Banko, a Sony music executive, as our CMO. Banko’s connections led to one of our biggest early wins: landing Davido, a global superstar, as an owner-ambassador. To this day, I still marvel at the fact that Davido believed in our vision when all we had were Tyler’s Figma designs. From Dream to Reality Early 2024 was a whirlwind. We hired Yurii and Vasyl, two developers from Ukraine who brought incredible skill and dedication to the team. Vasyl, in particular, stood out as a leader and has since earned an equity position in the company. But despite these wins, we were facing growing pains. Our new CTO struggled to meet deadlines, and as a result, I found myself constantly pushing back the launch date. What started as a January release turned into February, then March, then April, then May. By then, people on Twitter Spaces—where I had been hyping up the platform—started doubting if we even had a product. Launch and Lessons June 1, 2024, marked a turning point. It was the day my son Noah was born and the day we launched Chatter in private beta. We started with just 40 users, but by the end of the month, we had grown to 1,000. The engagement was unbelievable. Users loved it, even though we had launched with just one feature: live rooms. This represented less than 20% of what we had planned, but it was enough to show that we were onto something big. In July, we launched our public beta on the App Store as an invite-only platform. Within 48 hours, Chatter ranked as a top 30 social app in over 30 countries. But our invite system throttled access, and most users couldn’t get in. While engagement metrics soared for those inside, our AWS costs exploded. In August, our AWS bill hit $10,000. By September, it had climbed to $15,000, and we were drowning in bugs and glitches. The breaking point came when our CTO became unresponsive, often disappearing during critical moments. Users were dropping off, frustrated by the issues, developers were confused and the team was also growing increasingly frustrated, I made the tough decision to let him go. A New Beginning Enter Horane, a long-time user of Chatter who had been with us since private beta. He was the first to discover some of the most innovative use cases for the platform and had a deep passion for its potential. After meeting him in person at a Chatter event, I knew he was the right person to step into the CTO role. When Horane took over, we discovered just how bad the situation was. Key areas of the codebase were locked, and there were no separate environments for development and production. Every fix seemed to break something else. But through sheer determination and countless 18-hour days, Horane stabilized the platform. Today, Chatter is far from perfect, but it’s stable. The bugs that plagued us have been reduced to moderate issues, and our core users—those who stuck with us through the chaos—are still engaged on the platform. Looking Ahead: Chatter V2 While the platform is stable now, we’ve shifted our focus to Chatter V2. This is where the magic really begins. V2 isn’t just an improvement; it’s a complete reimagining of the platform. It includes all the features we couldn’t release in V1 because we were too busy putting out fires. Imagine this: Chatter V1, with only one live feature, was incredibly sticky. Now think about what happens when we release a fully loaded platform with all the innovative features we’ve been working on behind the scenes. The possibilities are endless. V2 is slated to hit TestFlight by the end of December, with a public release in January 2025. And this time, we’re ready—not just with the product but with the lessons we’ve learned. The Hard Lessons This journey has taught me more than I ever thought possible: 1) Your Team is Everything: The right people can make or break your vision. Finding people who believe in your mission is just as important as finding people with the right skills. 2) Adaptability is Key: As a non-technical founder, I had to learn about development, DevOps, and product management on the fly. Challenges will push you to grow, whether you’re ready or not. 3) Trust the Process: Every setback, every delay, every bug—it all taught us something. Without those lessons, we wouldn’t be building the incredible V2 product we are today. 4) Resilience is Non-Negotiable: From technical disasters to predatory investors who tried to exploit my desperation, I’ve had to fight for this vision every step of the way. What’s Next December is shaping up to be an exciting month. We have some amazing events planned on the platform to close out the year, bringing our core community together as we prepare for the V2 launch. When V2 drops, it will mark a new era for Chatter. This isn’t just a social audio platform or a social audiovisual platform. Chatter is all about interactive experiences—making social media social again in ways that are truly unique. The public launch is slated for February 2025, and for the first time, we’ll have the marketing dollars to tell the world about Chatter. Our core community has been our biggest cheerleaders, and I can’t wait to see how the world reacts when they experience what we’ve built. Final Thoughts This has been the hardest year of my life, but also the most rewarding. To other founders, or anyone thinking about starting a company: know this—it will test you in ways you can’t imagine. You’ll face betrayal, doubt, and moments where you feel like giving up. But if you believe in your vision and refuse to quit, you’ll find a way forward. Thank you to everyone who has supported me, my team, and Chatter. We’re just getting started. Let’s talk about it. 🚀 If this story inspired you, please like and share it so others can learn from my experiences. The journey is far from over, but I’m more excited than ever for what’s to come.
0:25

From Creator to Founder: The Rollercoaster Journey of Building Chatter Social Man, what a journey it’s been so far. Four years ago, I was just another creator, spending late nights on Clubhouse during the height of the pandemic. Like so many others, I was searching for connection, for community, for something meaningful. But what I found there wasn’t just connection—it was purpose. Alongside my brother, Jonathan Bing, we built a nightly show that reached over 5 million people. Imagine that: 5 million lives touched by conversations that felt real and unfiltered, all on a platform that at its peak had 10 million monthly active users. Clubhouse was magic. But then the decline began. Watching the platform struggle, I couldn’t help but reflect: what made it great? What went wrong? And what could the future look like if we did things differently? The Spark of Chatter As a content creator, I understood the needs of both creators and users. I knew what excited people, what kept them engaged, and what made them leave. Clubhouse had tapped into something special, but it had missed the mark on scalability and sustainability. By September 2023, I couldn’t stop thinking about the potential for something new—something that brought back the magic of real-time interaction but made it scalable, engaging, and sticky. And so, I set out to build Chatter Social. But I wasn’t a tech founder. I didn’t have a background in software development or a network of Silicon Valley insiders. What I did have was determination and the belief that if I could bring the right people together, we could build something extraordinary. Building the Team The journey to build Chatter started with assembling a team. Through my network from my days on Clubhouse, I found Samir, my first CTO. He believed in the vision and was instrumental in getting the project off the ground. Shortly after, I connected with Tyler, our Head of Design, whose creativity brought life to our ideas. A developer joined us soon after, and we were off to the races. By the end of 2023, Samir had to step away due to other commitments, and we promoted the developer to CTO. At the same time, I brought on Banko, a Sony music executive, as our CMO. Banko’s connections led to one of our biggest early wins: landing Davido, a global superstar, as an owner-ambassador. To this day, I still marvel at the fact that Davido believed in our vision when all we had were Tyler’s Figma designs. From Dream to Reality Early 2024 was a whirlwind. We hired Yurii and Vasyl, two developers from Ukraine who brought incredible skill and dedication to the team. Vasyl, in particular, stood out as a leader and has since earned an equity position in the company. But despite these wins, we were facing growing pains. Our new CTO struggled to meet deadlines, and as a result, I found myself constantly pushing back the launch date. What started as a January release turned into February, then March, then April, then May. By then, people on Twitter Spaces—where I had been hyping up the platform—started doubting if we even had a product. Launch and Lessons June 1, 2024, marked a turning point. It was the day my son Noah was born and the day we launched Chatter in private beta. We started with just 40 users, but by the end of the month, we had grown to 1,000. The engagement was unbelievable. Users loved it, even though we had launched with just one feature: live rooms. This represented less than 20% of what we had planned, but it was enough to show that we were onto something big. In July, we launched our public beta on the App Store as an invite-only platform. Within 48 hours, Chatter ranked as a top 30 social app in over 30 countries. But our invite system throttled access, and most users couldn’t get in. While engagement metrics soared for those inside, our AWS costs exploded. In August, our AWS bill hit $10,000. By September, it had climbed to $15,000, and we were drowning in bugs and glitches. The breaking point came when our CTO became unresponsive, often disappearing during critical moments. Users were dropping off, frustrated by the issues, developers were confused and the team was also growing increasingly frustrated, I made the tough decision to let him go. A New Beginning Enter Horane, a long-time user of Chatter who had been with us since private beta. He was the first to discover some of the most innovative use cases for the platform and had a deep passion for its potential. After meeting him in person at a Chatter event, I knew he was the right person to step into the CTO role. When Horane took over, we discovered just how bad the situation was. Key areas of the codebase were locked, and there were no separate environments for development and production. Every fix seemed to break something else. But through sheer determination and countless 18-hour days, Horane stabilized the platform. Today, Chatter is far from perfect, but it’s stable. The bugs that plagued us have been reduced to moderate issues, and our core users—those who stuck with us through the chaos—are still engaged on the platform. Looking Ahead: Chatter V2 While the platform is stable now, we’ve shifted our focus to Chatter V2. This is where the magic really begins. V2 isn’t just an improvement; it’s a complete reimagining of the platform. It includes all the features we couldn’t release in V1 because we were too busy putting out fires. Imagine this: Chatter V1, with only one live feature, was incredibly sticky. Now think about what happens when we release a fully loaded platform with all the innovative features we’ve been working on behind the scenes. The possibilities are endless. V2 is slated to hit TestFlight by the end of December, with a public release in January 2025. And this time, we’re ready—not just with the product but with the lessons we’ve learned. The Hard Lessons This journey has taught me more than I ever thought possible: 1) Your Team is Everything: The right people can make or break your vision. Finding people who believe in your mission is just as important as finding people with the right skills. 2) Adaptability is Key: As a non-technical founder, I had to learn about development, DevOps, and product management on the fly. Challenges will push you to grow, whether you’re ready or not. 3) Trust the Process: Every setback, every delay, every bug—it all taught us something. Without those lessons, we wouldn’t be building the incredible V2 product we are today. 4) Resilience is Non-Negotiable: From technical disasters to predatory investors who tried to exploit my desperation, I’ve had to fight for this vision every step of the way. What’s Next December is shaping up to be an exciting month. We have some amazing events planned on the platform to close out the year, bringing our core community together as we prepare for the V2 launch. When V2 drops, it will mark a new era for Chatter. This isn’t just a social audio platform or a social audiovisual platform. Chatter is all about interactive experiences—making social media social again in ways that are truly unique. The public launch is slated for February 2025, and for the first time, we’ll have the marketing dollars to tell the world about Chatter. Our core community has been our biggest cheerleaders, and I can’t wait to see how the world reacts when they experience what we’ve built. Final Thoughts This has been the hardest year of my life, but also the most rewarding. To other founders, or anyone thinking about starting a company: know this—it will test you in ways you can’t imagine. You’ll face betrayal, doubt, and moments where you feel like giving up. But if you believe in your vision and refuse to quit, you’ll find a way forward. Thank you to everyone who has supported me, my team, and Chatter. We’re just getting started. Let’s talk about it. 🚀 If this story inspired you, please like and share it so others can learn from my experiences. The journey is far from over, but I’m more excited than ever for what’s to come.

Nelson Epega

43,485 просмотров • 1 год назад

On March 15th, 2021, an anonymous Twitter user asked Harvard Medical professor Martin Kulldorff a question. “Do you think younger age groups and or people who have already had the virus need to be vaccinated?” Who is Martin Kulldorff? He’s a Harvard Medical School professor for 21 years, a well-known Swedish biostatistician who developed widely used software for disease mapping, the co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration on how to deal with the COVID pandemic, and an advisor to the world’s leading health organizations. What he said was that “Thinking that everyone must be vaccinated is as scientifically flawed as thinking that nobody should get COVID. Vaccines are important for older high-risk people and their caretakers. Those with prior natural infection do not need it, nor do children.” Natural immunity. Is it a myth — a “conspiracy theory” — that once you have been sick from a virus, then you won’t get sick, or as sick, again? In fact, we’ve known for 2,500 years that natural immunity is real. “The same man was never attacked twice, never at least fatally,” wrote Thucydides, describing the plague of Athens. He observed that recovered individuals could safely nurse the sick without falling ill themselves. And yet Twitter censored Martin Kulldorff’s tweet. “Learn why health officials recommend a vaccine,” read a warning that Twitter employees put on it. For most people, the Tweet cannot be replied to, shared or liked. In other words, Twitter had decided that this professor at Harvard Medical School was wrong, and that natural immunity wasn’t really something that could protect you from COVID. Jay Bhattacharya, who’s currently our Director of the National Institutes of Health, and thus one of the highest-ranking public health officials in the world, was a Stanford epidemiologist before that. Twitter put him on a “Trends Blacklist.” Not long before we discovered this, we were told that shadow-banning was a conspiracy theory, because Twitter had said it didn’t shadow-ban. Now the European Commission is trying to censor the entire global internet. They want to put a 140 million Euro fine on X. They want to end anonymity, which was what allowed that question of Kulldorff to be asked. They want to use a “Democracy Shield” program to shield the Commission from democracy. And the Commission wants to impose “chat control” so they can read your private messages. It just gets worse and worse. Unsubstantiated and likely false claims of Russian government election interference through TikTok and social media were made in Romania and in the Czech Republic. Truth is not something that anybody holds as a possession and rather emerges through dialogue. We’ve known that since Plato and Socrates. We need free speech for science, public health, and national security. It’s essential to journalism, democracy, and human freedom. Free speech enabled civilization; censorship threatens it. This is the only political cause that I would die for. And yet there is currently an active coordination between Stanford, Brazil, Australia, and others to impose what I think we can call, without exaggeration, global totalitarianism. They’re pushing for digital identification that will end anonymity online. Why is that? Why are these guys behaving in this way? When Elon Musk took over Twitter on October 28th, 2022, unprecedented insight into multiple secret government mass censorship efforts emerged from this exploration. We had unlimited access to Twitter files. They revealed that the mainstream news reporters, who don’t deserve the name, were demanding censorship. No true journalist demands censorship of his fellow journalists. What emerged from this was an understanding of something we call the “Censorship Industrial Complex,” which directly grew out of the military industrial complex and was run by active or former intelligence community officials who often operate under that banner. It led to multiple congressional investigations and hearings, and it spread across every social media platform. So we now know the censorship that occurred, not just at Twitter, but at YouTube, at Facebook, TikTok, and other platforms. What is the Censorship Industrial Complex? The model isn’t that complicated to understand. The government chooses people whom they call “researchers” to serve as censors. These are government-funded individuals who often come from the intelligence community and foreign policy establishment. They work at non-governmental organizations funded by governments or at universities funded by governments. They conduct “fact checks” to serve as “trusted flaggers.” These “trusted flaggers” demand censorship by social media platforms. It’s all done in secret. They’re looking to censor narratives. This is essential because, as decades of good cognitive science have shown, people understand and retain information through storytelling. We think in terms of stories, not bullet points. And so they were out to censor whole narratives. From the Stanford censorship project on COVID, the “Virality Project,” they said they wanted to censor “true stories” of vaccine side effects. Why? Because it might “fuel hesitancy.” In other words, they want to control your behavior. They don’t want you to receive true information that might lead you to not get the vaccine. If that isn’t totalitarianism straight out of 1984, I don’t know what it. These people were on the verge of passing legislation in the United States that would’ve authorized the National Science Foundation to choose these “researcher” censors. I’m presenting slides to Europeans and the world for situational awareness into what totalitarian politicians and bureaucrats have planned because this is still going strong. Stanford helped the US government censor COVID dissidents, and then they lied about it. You might be detecting a pattern. They’re really not interested in censoring “misinformation.’ They’re very interested in censoring true information. The censors flagged an Israeli preprint which came out in December, 2020 and found, lo and behold, that natural immunity is a real thing. In fact, it’s more protective than the vaccine. But the censors flagged somebody’s Google Drive. “See the following Google Drive links being used to compile testimonies about vaccine shedding, Covid videos, showing side effects and whatnot.” Google then removed that content from that person’s Google Drive. You don’t control your Google Drive. Contrary to Stanford’s claim that the project did not ask social media platforms to remove any content, they privately said they did. And we know that many hundreds of thousands of tweets and Facebook posts were removed, even though they were a hundred percent accurate. In fact, in 2021, Stanford’s “Virality Project” flagged accurate claims that the World Health Organization did not recommend vaccinating children. The people who spread the misinformation are the people demanding the censorship. They claimed Covid couldn’t have come from a lab, that the Covid vaccine prevented infection, and that natural immunity didn’t exist. The only solution to hate speech and misinformation is free speech. If you censor false information, how would anybody get the true information? The whole point is the debate. They lied when they said false information travels faster than true information. It’s a completely bogus study and involved six seconds of content on Twitter. Who are these people? As of 2020, there were so many former FBI employees at Twitter that they called them “Bu alumni.” They created their own private Slack channel and a crib sheet to onboard new FBI arrivals. Intriguingly, we discovered that the general counsel of the FBI — arguably the second most powerful person of the FBI, or maybe the first, if you think, consider that what their actual job is to decide what the FBI can and can’t do — resigned from FBI in early 2020 and went to Twitter to take the deputy general counsel role. Isn’t that interesting? Somebody in one of the most powerful legal positions in the world would take a junior legal role at a social media company. Why would that be? This email popped up when we were going through Twitter files and it really jumped out at us. It’s from the director of policy at Twitter. “We have seen a sustained if uncoordinated” — supposedly — “effort by the intelligence community to push us to share more information and change our API policies. They’re probing and pushing everywhere they can.” The Hunter Biden laptop censorship occurred later that year. The FBI and the intelligence community discredited accurate, factual information about Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings both before and after the New York Post revealed the contents of his laptop on October 14th, 2020. How could the FBI spread false information about something that nobody knew about? Because the FBI had Hunter Biden’s laptop, which showed his family’s massive influence peddling scheme. It consisted of accepting tens of millions of dollars, including from the Chinese government. The FBI had been sitting on that laptop since December of 2019. They had been given it by the computer repair store owner, who had been given the laptop by Hunter Biden, likely because he dropped it in his bathtub or in the pool, when he was on one of his many crack and alcohol benders. The government strategy is always the same: spread disinformation first, then demand censorship of accurate information on the basis of it . “The FBI came to us in the summer of 2020,” Mark Zuckerberg told Joe Rogan two years later, “and they were like, ‘Hey, you should be on the alert. We thought that there was a lot of Russian propaganda in 2016. There’s about to be some kind of dump.’” In the summer of 2020, the New York Post had not published the story about the Hunter Biden laptop. It would only come out in October. We see something very interesting show up in the Twitter files: the Aspen Institute, an intermediary between the intelligence community and the public. It’s known as a Davos-style gab fest in the United States. It’s also the place where intelligence community operations are run. They hosted a workshop to train reporters and all of the social media’s top censorship officials, known as “trust and safety officials,” how to deal with a story they would hear in the future relating to Hunter Biden and Barisma. A few months earlier, the Stanford Cyber Policy Center had published a report attacking what we in the United States call the Pentagon Papers Principle. The Pentagon Papers Principle says that if a government official gives me, a journalist, a bunch of Pentagon documents showing that we’re losing the war in Vietnam, I, as a journalist, can publish them, and not risk prison. That was decided in a famous Supreme Court case in 1971. Stanford argued that, really, we should get rid of that principle, which may be the most important investigative journalism principle in the United States, and said, “You should cover the person who leaked the materials, not the leaked emails.” In other words, you should cover and expose the whistleblower. The person who exposed the Pentagon Papers is the real bad guy, not the DOD, CIA, and presidents who had lied to us for over a decade. Stanford was training the journalists and the social media trust and safety officers in how to cover a story that had not yet come out. This is known as “pre-bunking,” and it’s also part of the European Union strategy to shield themselves from democracy. When the Hunter Biden story appeared October 22nd, Twitter’s trust and safety censorship official said it didn’t violate its terms of service. There’s nothing illegal about any of this. The Supreme Court has made it very clear that you’re allowed to report on information that’s been leaked to you. At that moment, the former FBI general counsel, Jim Baker, argued vigorously that Twitter really needed to censor it. Baker won and they censored the story. It’s not that we didn’t hear about the Hunter Biden laptop story when it came out. I certainly did. But we had the impression that there was something wrong with it, that it was not really the whole story. And so many of us dismissed it. What they had done was a psyop on this major story. They had changed our perception of the story. And it worked. It worked on me, it worked on everybody I knew. What is the role of the intelligence community of social media companies? The former CIA people are the head of elections at Meta, and Google’s head of trust and safety. Former and current CIA officers have a history of spreading misinformation and promoting the Russiagate conspiracy theory. We now know that between 2018 and 2023, there were 36 people from the CIA 68 from the FBI 44, from the National Security Administration and 68 from the Department of Homeland Security who had moved to work at the social media platforms. This is not unique to the United States. My colleague Cecilia Jilková, the daughter of famous Czech dissidents, discovered that European Union officials claimed, days before the European elections in 2024, that a “pro-Kremlin website” was spreading propaganda and were paying off European politicians. That was the headline in Politico. We wrote to them and asked, “Where’s the evidence of this? Just go ahead and share the evidence to support your accusation days before the European parliamentary elections.” Nobody was arrested. They never produced the evidence. The former Czech president, Václav Klaus, who was accused of this, said, “We don’t even know what the ‘Voice of Europe’ is.” Another Czech politician said, “How could I have known it would be a security threat? At the time I gave the interview, they weren’t on any list.” Another said, “If they’re such a big threat, why did the European Parliament let the Voice of Europe’s journalists inside?” Nobody responded. Nobody talked to us. This was a disinformation campaign carried by Politico, which, in my view, is a suspect publication. In the spring of 2022, Barack Obama went to Stanford to give a speech at the Stanford Cyber Policy Center run by Michael McFaul, his former ambassador to Russia. Obama said misinformation harms democracy and urged support for legislation in Congress that would empower government-appointed researchers to serve as “trusted flaggers.” Six days later, the Department of Homeland Security rolled out their Disinformation Governance Board. What a coincidence that they got Obama to frame the issue for them. Facebook in 2021 censored accurate vaccine information so the White House would help it to get data from Europe. In addition to removing vaccine misinformation, wrote Facebook to the White House, we have been focused on reducing the virality of content discouraging vaccines that does not contain actionable misinformation. White House said jump, and Facebook said how high? Why did they do it? Why would they voluntarily censor? This also emerged from the Facebook files. Nick Clegg on the left wrote an email to his colleagues. He said, “My sense is that given we’ve got bigger fish, we have to fry with the administration, e.g., data flows, it doesn’t seem like a great place for us to be.” Data flows. What’s he talking about? He’s talking about billions of dollars worth of business that he has to, that they would have to pay the European Commission for if they didn’t have the support from the Biden administration to lean on the European Commission. In other words, this was a shakedown by the White House of Facebook and it worked in France, the country of Liberté. Turns out it has a special role.... Please subscribe now to support Public's defense of free speech, watch the full video, and read the rest of the article!
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On March 15th, 2021, an anonymous Twitter user asked Harvard Medical professor Martin Kulldorff a question. “Do you think younger age groups and or people who have already had the virus need to be vaccinated?” Who is Martin Kulldorff? He’s a Harvard Medical School professor for 21 years, a well-known Swedish biostatistician who developed widely used software for disease mapping, the co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration on how to deal with the COVID pandemic, and an advisor to the world’s leading health organizations. What he said was that “Thinking that everyone must be vaccinated is as scientifically flawed as thinking that nobody should get COVID. Vaccines are important for older high-risk people and their caretakers. Those with prior natural infection do not need it, nor do children.” Natural immunity. Is it a myth — a “conspiracy theory” — that once you have been sick from a virus, then you won’t get sick, or as sick, again? In fact, we’ve known for 2,500 years that natural immunity is real. “The same man was never attacked twice, never at least fatally,” wrote Thucydides, describing the plague of Athens. He observed that recovered individuals could safely nurse the sick without falling ill themselves. And yet Twitter censored Martin Kulldorff’s tweet. “Learn why health officials recommend a vaccine,” read a warning that Twitter employees put on it. For most people, the Tweet cannot be replied to, shared or liked. In other words, Twitter had decided that this professor at Harvard Medical School was wrong, and that natural immunity wasn’t really something that could protect you from COVID. Jay Bhattacharya, who’s currently our Director of the National Institutes of Health, and thus one of the highest-ranking public health officials in the world, was a Stanford epidemiologist before that. Twitter put him on a “Trends Blacklist.” Not long before we discovered this, we were told that shadow-banning was a conspiracy theory, because Twitter had said it didn’t shadow-ban. Now the European Commission is trying to censor the entire global internet. They want to put a 140 million Euro fine on X. They want to end anonymity, which was what allowed that question of Kulldorff to be asked. They want to use a “Democracy Shield” program to shield the Commission from democracy. And the Commission wants to impose “chat control” so they can read your private messages. It just gets worse and worse. Unsubstantiated and likely false claims of Russian government election interference through TikTok and social media were made in Romania and in the Czech Republic. Truth is not something that anybody holds as a possession and rather emerges through dialogue. We’ve known that since Plato and Socrates. We need free speech for science, public health, and national security. It’s essential to journalism, democracy, and human freedom. Free speech enabled civilization; censorship threatens it. This is the only political cause that I would die for. And yet there is currently an active coordination between Stanford, Brazil, Australia, and others to impose what I think we can call, without exaggeration, global totalitarianism. They’re pushing for digital identification that will end anonymity online. Why is that? Why are these guys behaving in this way? When Elon Musk took over Twitter on October 28th, 2022, unprecedented insight into multiple secret government mass censorship efforts emerged from this exploration. We had unlimited access to Twitter files. They revealed that the mainstream news reporters, who don’t deserve the name, were demanding censorship. No true journalist demands censorship of his fellow journalists. What emerged from this was an understanding of something we call the “Censorship Industrial Complex,” which directly grew out of the military industrial complex and was run by active or former intelligence community officials who often operate under that banner. It led to multiple congressional investigations and hearings, and it spread across every social media platform. So we now know the censorship that occurred, not just at Twitter, but at YouTube, at Facebook, TikTok, and other platforms. What is the Censorship Industrial Complex? The model isn’t that complicated to understand. The government chooses people whom they call “researchers” to serve as censors. These are government-funded individuals who often come from the intelligence community and foreign policy establishment. They work at non-governmental organizations funded by governments or at universities funded by governments. They conduct “fact checks” to serve as “trusted flaggers.” These “trusted flaggers” demand censorship by social media platforms. It’s all done in secret. They’re looking to censor narratives. This is essential because, as decades of good cognitive science have shown, people understand and retain information through storytelling. We think in terms of stories, not bullet points. And so they were out to censor whole narratives. From the Stanford censorship project on COVID, the “Virality Project,” they said they wanted to censor “true stories” of vaccine side effects. Why? Because it might “fuel hesitancy.” In other words, they want to control your behavior. They don’t want you to receive true information that might lead you to not get the vaccine. If that isn’t totalitarianism straight out of 1984, I don’t know what it. These people were on the verge of passing legislation in the United States that would’ve authorized the National Science Foundation to choose these “researcher” censors. I’m presenting slides to Europeans and the world for situational awareness into what totalitarian politicians and bureaucrats have planned because this is still going strong. Stanford helped the US government censor COVID dissidents, and then they lied about it. You might be detecting a pattern. They’re really not interested in censoring “misinformation.’ They’re very interested in censoring true information. The censors flagged an Israeli preprint which came out in December, 2020 and found, lo and behold, that natural immunity is a real thing. In fact, it’s more protective than the vaccine. But the censors flagged somebody’s Google Drive. “See the following Google Drive links being used to compile testimonies about vaccine shedding, Covid videos, showing side effects and whatnot.” Google then removed that content from that person’s Google Drive. You don’t control your Google Drive. Contrary to Stanford’s claim that the project did not ask social media platforms to remove any content, they privately said they did. And we know that many hundreds of thousands of tweets and Facebook posts were removed, even though they were a hundred percent accurate. In fact, in 2021, Stanford’s “Virality Project” flagged accurate claims that the World Health Organization did not recommend vaccinating children. The people who spread the misinformation are the people demanding the censorship. They claimed Covid couldn’t have come from a lab, that the Covid vaccine prevented infection, and that natural immunity didn’t exist. The only solution to hate speech and misinformation is free speech. If you censor false information, how would anybody get the true information? The whole point is the debate. They lied when they said false information travels faster than true information. It’s a completely bogus study and involved six seconds of content on Twitter. Who are these people? As of 2020, there were so many former FBI employees at Twitter that they called them “Bu alumni.” They created their own private Slack channel and a crib sheet to onboard new FBI arrivals. Intriguingly, we discovered that the general counsel of the FBI — arguably the second most powerful person of the FBI, or maybe the first, if you think, consider that what their actual job is to decide what the FBI can and can’t do — resigned from FBI in early 2020 and went to Twitter to take the deputy general counsel role. Isn’t that interesting? Somebody in one of the most powerful legal positions in the world would take a junior legal role at a social media company. Why would that be? This email popped up when we were going through Twitter files and it really jumped out at us. It’s from the director of policy at Twitter. “We have seen a sustained if uncoordinated” — supposedly — “effort by the intelligence community to push us to share more information and change our API policies. They’re probing and pushing everywhere they can.” The Hunter Biden laptop censorship occurred later that year. The FBI and the intelligence community discredited accurate, factual information about Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings both before and after the New York Post revealed the contents of his laptop on October 14th, 2020. How could the FBI spread false information about something that nobody knew about? Because the FBI had Hunter Biden’s laptop, which showed his family’s massive influence peddling scheme. It consisted of accepting tens of millions of dollars, including from the Chinese government. The FBI had been sitting on that laptop since December of 2019. They had been given it by the computer repair store owner, who had been given the laptop by Hunter Biden, likely because he dropped it in his bathtub or in the pool, when he was on one of his many crack and alcohol benders. The government strategy is always the same: spread disinformation first, then demand censorship of accurate information on the basis of it . “The FBI came to us in the summer of 2020,” Mark Zuckerberg told Joe Rogan two years later, “and they were like, ‘Hey, you should be on the alert. We thought that there was a lot of Russian propaganda in 2016. There’s about to be some kind of dump.’” In the summer of 2020, the New York Post had not published the story about the Hunter Biden laptop. It would only come out in October. We see something very interesting show up in the Twitter files: the Aspen Institute, an intermediary between the intelligence community and the public. It’s known as a Davos-style gab fest in the United States. It’s also the place where intelligence community operations are run. They hosted a workshop to train reporters and all of the social media’s top censorship officials, known as “trust and safety officials,” how to deal with a story they would hear in the future relating to Hunter Biden and Barisma. A few months earlier, the Stanford Cyber Policy Center had published a report attacking what we in the United States call the Pentagon Papers Principle. The Pentagon Papers Principle says that if a government official gives me, a journalist, a bunch of Pentagon documents showing that we’re losing the war in Vietnam, I, as a journalist, can publish them, and not risk prison. That was decided in a famous Supreme Court case in 1971. Stanford argued that, really, we should get rid of that principle, which may be the most important investigative journalism principle in the United States, and said, “You should cover the person who leaked the materials, not the leaked emails.” In other words, you should cover and expose the whistleblower. The person who exposed the Pentagon Papers is the real bad guy, not the DOD, CIA, and presidents who had lied to us for over a decade. Stanford was training the journalists and the social media trust and safety officers in how to cover a story that had not yet come out. This is known as “pre-bunking,” and it’s also part of the European Union strategy to shield themselves from democracy. When the Hunter Biden story appeared October 22nd, Twitter’s trust and safety censorship official said it didn’t violate its terms of service. There’s nothing illegal about any of this. The Supreme Court has made it very clear that you’re allowed to report on information that’s been leaked to you. At that moment, the former FBI general counsel, Jim Baker, argued vigorously that Twitter really needed to censor it. Baker won and they censored the story. It’s not that we didn’t hear about the Hunter Biden laptop story when it came out. I certainly did. But we had the impression that there was something wrong with it, that it was not really the whole story. And so many of us dismissed it. What they had done was a psyop on this major story. They had changed our perception of the story. And it worked. It worked on me, it worked on everybody I knew. What is the role of the intelligence community of social media companies? The former CIA people are the head of elections at Meta, and Google’s head of trust and safety. Former and current CIA officers have a history of spreading misinformation and promoting the Russiagate conspiracy theory. We now know that between 2018 and 2023, there were 36 people from the CIA 68 from the FBI 44, from the National Security Administration and 68 from the Department of Homeland Security who had moved to work at the social media platforms. This is not unique to the United States. My colleague Cecilia Jilková, the daughter of famous Czech dissidents, discovered that European Union officials claimed, days before the European elections in 2024, that a “pro-Kremlin website” was spreading propaganda and were paying off European politicians. That was the headline in Politico. We wrote to them and asked, “Where’s the evidence of this? Just go ahead and share the evidence to support your accusation days before the European parliamentary elections.” Nobody was arrested. They never produced the evidence. The former Czech president, Václav Klaus, who was accused of this, said, “We don’t even know what the ‘Voice of Europe’ is.” Another Czech politician said, “How could I have known it would be a security threat? At the time I gave the interview, they weren’t on any list.” Another said, “If they’re such a big threat, why did the European Parliament let the Voice of Europe’s journalists inside?” Nobody responded. Nobody talked to us. This was a disinformation campaign carried by Politico, which, in my view, is a suspect publication. In the spring of 2022, Barack Obama went to Stanford to give a speech at the Stanford Cyber Policy Center run by Michael McFaul, his former ambassador to Russia. Obama said misinformation harms democracy and urged support for legislation in Congress that would empower government-appointed researchers to serve as “trusted flaggers.” Six days later, the Department of Homeland Security rolled out their Disinformation Governance Board. What a coincidence that they got Obama to frame the issue for them. Facebook in 2021 censored accurate vaccine information so the White House would help it to get data from Europe. In addition to removing vaccine misinformation, wrote Facebook to the White House, we have been focused on reducing the virality of content discouraging vaccines that does not contain actionable misinformation. White House said jump, and Facebook said how high? Why did they do it? Why would they voluntarily censor? This also emerged from the Facebook files. Nick Clegg on the left wrote an email to his colleagues. He said, “My sense is that given we’ve got bigger fish, we have to fry with the administration, e.g., data flows, it doesn’t seem like a great place for us to be.” Data flows. What’s he talking about? He’s talking about billions of dollars worth of business that he has to, that they would have to pay the European Commission for if they didn’t have the support from the Biden administration to lean on the European Commission. In other words, this was a shakedown by the White House of Facebook and it worked in France, the country of Liberté. Turns out it has a special role.... Please subscribe now to support Public's defense of free speech, watch the full video, and read the rest of the article!

Michael Shellenberger

174,749 просмотров • 7 месяцев назад

Ten Takeaways From 10/21/25 ONE) NBA on NBC Hello, friends. Welcome to the 2025-26 NBA season. It’s been a minute, hasn’t it? A whole lot has changed since we last spoke. We were reintroduced to the NBA on NBC. Can’t believe it’s been almost 25 years, but here we are again. They absolutely crushed it after having some early audio difficulties. I get how cliché it is, but I seriously got chills once “Roundball Rock” started playing. Thought Carmelo Anthony, Vince Carter, and Tracy McGrady had contagious energy in the pre-game coverage. The graphics are clean and straightforward. Really like the team fouls tracking in the score bug—just a very pleasant experience. Looking forward to the “Prime” experience. God, can’t believe it costs $650 to watch basketball now. We need to talk about the MJ segment, though. If you’ve been living under a rock, NBC shocked the world and somehow convinced Michael Jordan to sign on as a “special contributor”. “Insights to Excellence” is sadly everything I thought it would be… nothing. He wasn’t in the studio or anything. Looked like some pre-recorded interview with Mike Tirico from who knows when at his house, talking about why he’s come out of hiding. The thing lasted about three and a half minutes. “To pay it forward. I had the obligation to basketball.” - MJ on the decision to join NBC Okay Mike. Hoping for some actual insight in future recordings. TWO) Champs Are Here OKC received their rings and raised their banner before the game. Vibes were immaculate. Dillon Jones was even in attendance. Good thing the Wizards waived him just in time for him to make his flight. Rockets weren’t having it, though. Ime Udoka said that they didn’t watch the ceremony and were instead focused on trying to ruin their night. Kevin Durant came out for warmups to loud boos, and so he booed them back. Everyone laughed. Meanwhile, Steven Adams still gets loud cheers because, well, who doesn’t love Steven Adams? It was a rough go-around for all Thunder not named Chet Holmgren (28 points, 11-17 FG) to start, especially SGA. He had just five points at the half on 40.0% shooting (2-5 FG), but you can only contain the league and Finals MVP for so long. He scored 24 of his 35 points in the 4th quarter and overtimes. What’s up with the four missed free throws (10-14 FT)? "I'm glad the guys enjoyed the ceremony. That's a great, great life event they had." - Mark Daigneault "It was surreal. I don't know how to describe it besides that. Seeing the banner raised was cool too... I'll remember it for the rest of my life." - SGA on the pregame ceremony THREE) Thunder Starters One of the more critical questions going into Opening Night was, “Who’s the 5th Thunder starter?” as we wait for JDub’s wrist to get right. SGA, Dort, Chet, and IHart felt obvious. Between Alex Caruso, Aaron Wiggins, and Cason Wallace, I leaned Cason mainly because of the bigger picture. Didn’t make sense to start Alex after managing him all last year, but then he started in every preseason game he played. Had to give that some sort of credit (and we did). Well, they ended up doing what they did a lot last year: change it up midway. Wallace started, and then Caruso started the second half… for Hartenstein. Here we go again. Cason’s playmaking looks improved. Daigneault went 11 deep (!!!) in the first quarter. Rookie, Brooks Barnhizer was the fourth sub off the bench, played about two minutes, and was never seen again. Part of that reason is Ajay Mitchell, who checked in after him (for Shai). There’s been some buzz, going back to his standout Summer League (19.8 ppg, 5.3 apg, 4.8 rpg, 1.5 spg). He scored 12 of his 16 points in the second quarter. “Not surprised. He was playing like this before he got hurt last year.” - Mark Daigneault on Ajay Mitchell FOUR) Jumbo Lineup It’s not much of a surprise to see Udoka start with the Steven Adams/Alperen Sengun pairing after how dominant they looked at the end of last season (+29.9 net rating, 162 minutes)—especially given the matchup, with Holmgren and Hartenstein on the other side. The real shocker is how much they leaned into it. Alpi and Adams shared the court for over 30 minutes (+8). LIKE WTF?!!! This was Adams' first time touching 37 minutes since November 9, 2022. They did just sign him to a three-year extension. You’d think they might wanna be careful with their investment. The average height of this Rockets' starting lineup is 6'10 (Thompson, Durant, Smith, Sengun, Adams), LMAO FIVE) Alpi Dominance Continues Maybe what Sengun was doing at EuroBasket 2025 (21.6 ppg, 10.1 rpg, 6.6 apg, 1.0 spg, and 1.1 bpg) translates over? Not gonna lie, I certainly had my doubts, but no… he’s looking just as dominant (I know, one game). Alperen Sengun vs Thunder: 39 PTS 11 REB 7 AST 2 STL 5-8 3P (career-high) 10-11 FT 27.7% USG Yeah, I see it too. Second time in his career, he’s attempted eight threes. Dude averaged 1.2 attempts per game last year. The hitch in his shot appears to be gone, so hey, this could be real (doubt it). All I know is that if it is, it’ll do wonders for his ceiling on sites that reward threes (DK). Also, going 10 of 11 from the line is something worth paying attention to. He was a 69.2% free-throw shooter last season. On the flip side, Amen Thompson (18 pts, 4 reb, 5 ast) had seven attempts from behind the arc and missed them all. Sucks, but his shot still looks flat. There’s no lift. While we’re here on Thompson, he had to leave the game late because of cramps. SIX) The Reed Conundrum I’ll give Reed Sheppard (9 pts, 4 ast, 37.9% TS, 28 min) this; he’s a confident motherfucker, and I love that about him (in a cute way). It’s hilarious how many times he looked off KD in this game. He’s gonna have stretches where he’s feeling it and looks automatic, but is it really gonna be worth it if his defense looks this dreadful? He can’t stay in front of anyone. The Thunder hunted and won that matchup with ease all night. Amen getting cramped up in OT1 really salvaged his minutes, cause I didn’t think he was gonna see the court again. Again, I know it’s only one game, but a couple more performances like this and things could get ugly. SEVEN) KD Gets Away With One Or should that say gets away with none? Kevin Durant (23 points, 9 rebounds) made his Rockets debut, and there’re gonna be two things you take away from it. Why’d you trade for him again? He was pretty much non-existent when they needed him most down the stretch, with a 12.5 USG% in both OT’s. There shouldn’t have been a second overtime. KD was clearly seen calling for a timeout after a rebound with about a second left on the clock. The problem is, they didn’t have any–He Webber’d it. He should have been T’d up, giving the Thunder a free throw to potentially end the game. Zarba and his buddies even got together to talk it over once the buzzer sounded, but did nothing. Strange, but luckily, it didn’t end up mattering much since OKC won in the second overtime. “Kevin definitely called timeout 3 times… They just missed it.” - SGA The Thunder beat the Rockets 125-124. EIGHT) Kuminga Starts Gallagher and I both felt pretty confident (sounds so stupid saying that with Kerr) that had Mosey Moody been available for this one, he would have been named the fifth starter, but his calf’s still bothering him. Steve Kerr decided to start Jonathan Kuminga (17 points, 9 rebounds, 6 assists, 33 minutes) instead, rewarding him for a strong preseason. There might be some more rewards coming because, whew, this is exactly what they’ve been wanting to see from him for the last couple of years, especially the boards. You wouldn’t know it from looking at Luka’s box score, but JK did about as well as you could defending him; he made his threes (4-6 3PT) and consistently found the open man. I’m gonna go ahead and guess that he starts again against Denver on Thursday Let the showcasing begin. “When you ask for opportunity, you must deliver. He’s been very vocal about his opportunity and he delivered.” - Draymond Green on Jonathan Kuminga “I just wanna help JK be great… We’ve been kickin' it. Hanging out. Watching film and just working on our game together. I know how great he wants to be and how great he can be.” - Jimmy Butler on mentoring Jonathan Kuminga NINE) Jimmy Being Jimmy One of the funnier moments of the night came post-game, when Jimmy Butler talked about a bet he made with Draymond Green. The wager is that he’ll have a better free-throw percentage than Steph Curry this season. Deadass, hahaha. He admitted that it’s probably a bad bet but I still love that he does this type of shit. Two years ago, he said he was playfully aiming to shoot 50.0% from three. He obviously didn’t hit that mark, but he did shoot a career-best 41.4% that season. If you’re wondering how the bet is looking to start after Game 1: Jimmy Butler: 16-16 FT (100.0%) Steph Curry: 8-8 FT (100.0%) Will keep you updated as the season goes. Jesus, 16 free throw attempts. “No chance.” - Steph Curry when asked if Jimmy Butler has any shot at winning the bet Before we’re done with GS, a shoutout to Will Richard (5 points, 14 minutes). We tease Kerr all the time about playing these randos, but this kid looks like he can actually play. TEN) All Luka and Austin The Lakers are gonna struggle hard while LeBron’s out. They just don’t have any other guys on the team that can create. Luka Doncic (43 points, 10 rebounds, 9 assists, 34.7% USG) and Austin Reaves (26 points, 9 assists, 30.1% USG) scored or assisted on 97 of the Lakers' 109 points. So wild. Marcus Smart (9 points) was the first sub off the bench. As for DeAndre Ayton’s debut (10 points, 6 rebounds, 4 turnovers), let’s just say it didn’t take long for the Lakers’ fan base to turn on him. Poor guy looked lost out there. "We just started. This is probably the second game we've played together." - Rui Hachimura on what the difference was for the Lakers "The trend I see is that we continue to be a terrible third-quarter team." - JJ Redick The Warriors beat the Lakers 119-109.
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Ten Takeaways From 10/21/25 ONE) NBA on NBC Hello, friends. Welcome to the 2025-26 NBA season. It’s been a minute, hasn’t it? A whole lot has changed since we last spoke. We were reintroduced to the NBA on NBC. Can’t believe it’s been almost 25 years, but here we are again. They absolutely crushed it after having some early audio difficulties. I get how cliché it is, but I seriously got chills once “Roundball Rock” started playing. Thought Carmelo Anthony, Vince Carter, and Tracy McGrady had contagious energy in the pre-game coverage. The graphics are clean and straightforward. Really like the team fouls tracking in the score bug—just a very pleasant experience. Looking forward to the “Prime” experience. God, can’t believe it costs $650 to watch basketball now. We need to talk about the MJ segment, though. If you’ve been living under a rock, NBC shocked the world and somehow convinced Michael Jordan to sign on as a “special contributor”. “Insights to Excellence” is sadly everything I thought it would be… nothing. He wasn’t in the studio or anything. Looked like some pre-recorded interview with Mike Tirico from who knows when at his house, talking about why he’s come out of hiding. The thing lasted about three and a half minutes. “To pay it forward. I had the obligation to basketball.” - MJ on the decision to join NBC Okay Mike. Hoping for some actual insight in future recordings. TWO) Champs Are Here OKC received their rings and raised their banner before the game. Vibes were immaculate. Dillon Jones was even in attendance. Good thing the Wizards waived him just in time for him to make his flight. Rockets weren’t having it, though. Ime Udoka said that they didn’t watch the ceremony and were instead focused on trying to ruin their night. Kevin Durant came out for warmups to loud boos, and so he booed them back. Everyone laughed. Meanwhile, Steven Adams still gets loud cheers because, well, who doesn’t love Steven Adams? It was a rough go-around for all Thunder not named Chet Holmgren (28 points, 11-17 FG) to start, especially SGA. He had just five points at the half on 40.0% shooting (2-5 FG), but you can only contain the league and Finals MVP for so long. He scored 24 of his 35 points in the 4th quarter and overtimes. What’s up with the four missed free throws (10-14 FT)? "I'm glad the guys enjoyed the ceremony. That's a great, great life event they had." - Mark Daigneault "It was surreal. I don't know how to describe it besides that. Seeing the banner raised was cool too... I'll remember it for the rest of my life." - SGA on the pregame ceremony THREE) Thunder Starters One of the more critical questions going into Opening Night was, “Who’s the 5th Thunder starter?” as we wait for JDub’s wrist to get right. SGA, Dort, Chet, and IHart felt obvious. Between Alex Caruso, Aaron Wiggins, and Cason Wallace, I leaned Cason mainly because of the bigger picture. Didn’t make sense to start Alex after managing him all last year, but then he started in every preseason game he played. Had to give that some sort of credit (and we did). Well, they ended up doing what they did a lot last year: change it up midway. Wallace started, and then Caruso started the second half… for Hartenstein. Here we go again. Cason’s playmaking looks improved. Daigneault went 11 deep (!!!) in the first quarter. Rookie, Brooks Barnhizer was the fourth sub off the bench, played about two minutes, and was never seen again. Part of that reason is Ajay Mitchell, who checked in after him (for Shai). There’s been some buzz, going back to his standout Summer League (19.8 ppg, 5.3 apg, 4.8 rpg, 1.5 spg). He scored 12 of his 16 points in the second quarter. “Not surprised. He was playing like this before he got hurt last year.” - Mark Daigneault on Ajay Mitchell FOUR) Jumbo Lineup It’s not much of a surprise to see Udoka start with the Steven Adams/Alperen Sengun pairing after how dominant they looked at the end of last season (+29.9 net rating, 162 minutes)—especially given the matchup, with Holmgren and Hartenstein on the other side. The real shocker is how much they leaned into it. Alpi and Adams shared the court for over 30 minutes (+8). LIKE WTF?!!! This was Adams' first time touching 37 minutes since November 9, 2022. They did just sign him to a three-year extension. You’d think they might wanna be careful with their investment. The average height of this Rockets' starting lineup is 6'10 (Thompson, Durant, Smith, Sengun, Adams), LMAO FIVE) Alpi Dominance Continues Maybe what Sengun was doing at EuroBasket 2025 (21.6 ppg, 10.1 rpg, 6.6 apg, 1.0 spg, and 1.1 bpg) translates over? Not gonna lie, I certainly had my doubts, but no… he’s looking just as dominant (I know, one game). Alperen Sengun vs Thunder: 39 PTS 11 REB 7 AST 2 STL 5-8 3P (career-high) 10-11 FT 27.7% USG Yeah, I see it too. Second time in his career, he’s attempted eight threes. Dude averaged 1.2 attempts per game last year. The hitch in his shot appears to be gone, so hey, this could be real (doubt it). All I know is that if it is, it’ll do wonders for his ceiling on sites that reward threes (DK). Also, going 10 of 11 from the line is something worth paying attention to. He was a 69.2% free-throw shooter last season. On the flip side, Amen Thompson (18 pts, 4 reb, 5 ast) had seven attempts from behind the arc and missed them all. Sucks, but his shot still looks flat. There’s no lift. While we’re here on Thompson, he had to leave the game late because of cramps. SIX) The Reed Conundrum I’ll give Reed Sheppard (9 pts, 4 ast, 37.9% TS, 28 min) this; he’s a confident motherfucker, and I love that about him (in a cute way). It’s hilarious how many times he looked off KD in this game. He’s gonna have stretches where he’s feeling it and looks automatic, but is it really gonna be worth it if his defense looks this dreadful? He can’t stay in front of anyone. The Thunder hunted and won that matchup with ease all night. Amen getting cramped up in OT1 really salvaged his minutes, cause I didn’t think he was gonna see the court again. Again, I know it’s only one game, but a couple more performances like this and things could get ugly. SEVEN) KD Gets Away With One Or should that say gets away with none? Kevin Durant (23 points, 9 rebounds) made his Rockets debut, and there’re gonna be two things you take away from it. Why’d you trade for him again? He was pretty much non-existent when they needed him most down the stretch, with a 12.5 USG% in both OT’s. There shouldn’t have been a second overtime. KD was clearly seen calling for a timeout after a rebound with about a second left on the clock. The problem is, they didn’t have any–He Webber’d it. He should have been T’d up, giving the Thunder a free throw to potentially end the game. Zarba and his buddies even got together to talk it over once the buzzer sounded, but did nothing. Strange, but luckily, it didn’t end up mattering much since OKC won in the second overtime. “Kevin definitely called timeout 3 times… They just missed it.” - SGA The Thunder beat the Rockets 125-124. EIGHT) Kuminga Starts Gallagher and I both felt pretty confident (sounds so stupid saying that with Kerr) that had Mosey Moody been available for this one, he would have been named the fifth starter, but his calf’s still bothering him. Steve Kerr decided to start Jonathan Kuminga (17 points, 9 rebounds, 6 assists, 33 minutes) instead, rewarding him for a strong preseason. There might be some more rewards coming because, whew, this is exactly what they’ve been wanting to see from him for the last couple of years, especially the boards. You wouldn’t know it from looking at Luka’s box score, but JK did about as well as you could defending him; he made his threes (4-6 3PT) and consistently found the open man. I’m gonna go ahead and guess that he starts again against Denver on Thursday Let the showcasing begin. “When you ask for opportunity, you must deliver. He’s been very vocal about his opportunity and he delivered.” - Draymond Green on Jonathan Kuminga “I just wanna help JK be great… We’ve been kickin' it. Hanging out. Watching film and just working on our game together. I know how great he wants to be and how great he can be.” - Jimmy Butler on mentoring Jonathan Kuminga NINE) Jimmy Being Jimmy One of the funnier moments of the night came post-game, when Jimmy Butler talked about a bet he made with Draymond Green. The wager is that he’ll have a better free-throw percentage than Steph Curry this season. Deadass, hahaha. He admitted that it’s probably a bad bet but I still love that he does this type of shit. Two years ago, he said he was playfully aiming to shoot 50.0% from three. He obviously didn’t hit that mark, but he did shoot a career-best 41.4% that season. If you’re wondering how the bet is looking to start after Game 1: Jimmy Butler: 16-16 FT (100.0%) Steph Curry: 8-8 FT (100.0%) Will keep you updated as the season goes. Jesus, 16 free throw attempts. “No chance.” - Steph Curry when asked if Jimmy Butler has any shot at winning the bet Before we’re done with GS, a shoutout to Will Richard (5 points, 14 minutes). We tease Kerr all the time about playing these randos, but this kid looks like he can actually play. TEN) All Luka and Austin The Lakers are gonna struggle hard while LeBron’s out. They just don’t have any other guys on the team that can create. Luka Doncic (43 points, 10 rebounds, 9 assists, 34.7% USG) and Austin Reaves (26 points, 9 assists, 30.1% USG) scored or assisted on 97 of the Lakers' 109 points. So wild. Marcus Smart (9 points) was the first sub off the bench. As for DeAndre Ayton’s debut (10 points, 6 rebounds, 4 turnovers), let’s just say it didn’t take long for the Lakers’ fan base to turn on him. Poor guy looked lost out there. "We just started. This is probably the second game we've played together." - Rui Hachimura on what the difference was for the Lakers "The trend I see is that we continue to be a terrible third-quarter team." - JJ Redick The Warriors beat the Lakers 119-109.

Establish The Run NBA

15,288 просмотров • 10 месяцев назад

Warren Buffett turns 93 today! To celebrate, I'm sharing the greatest lecture he ever gave together with his 94 (!) best investment quotes. 1. Rule No. 1 is never lose money. Rule No. 2 is never forget Rule No. 1. 2. Diversification is a protection against ignorance. It makes very little sense for those who know what they're doing. 3. Do not take yearly results too seriously. Instead, focus on four or five-year averages. 4. All there is to investing is picking good stocks at good times and staying with them as long as they remain good companies. 5. American business - and consequently a basket of stocks - is virtually certain to be worth far more in the years ahead. 6. An investor should act as though he had a lifetime decision card with just twenty punches on it. 7. And so the important thing we do with managers, generally, is to find the .400 hitters and then not tell them how to swing. 8. The most important quality for an investor is temperament, not intellect. You need a temperament that neither derives great pleasure from being with the crowd or against the crowd. 9. Bitcoin has no unique value at all. 10. Buy a stock the way you would buy a house. Understand and like it such that you'd be content to own it in the absence of any market. 11. The years ahead will occasionally deliver major market declines - even panics - that will affect virtually all stocks. No one can tell you when these traumas will occur. 12. I insist on a lot of time being spent, almost every day, to just sit and think. That is very uncommon in American business. 13. Buy companies with strong histories of profitability and with a dominant business franchise. 14. For the investor, a too-high purchase price for the stock of an excellent company can undo the effects of a subsequent decade of favorable business developments. 15. I believe in giving my kids enough so they can do anything, but not so much that they can do nothing. 16. The world went mad. What we learn from history is that people don’t learn from history. 17. The key to investing is not assessing how much an industry is going to affect society, or how much it will grow, but rather determining the competitive advantage of any given company and, above all, the durability of that advantage. 18. Among the various propositions offered to you, if you invested in a very low cost index fund - where you don't put the money in at one time, but average in over 10 years - you'll do better than 90% of people who start investing at the same time. 19. Because if you're wrong and rates go to 2 percent, which I don't think they will, you pay it off. It's a one-way renegotiation. It is an incredibly attractive instrument for the homeowner and you've got a one-way bet. 20. Cash is to a business as oxygen is to an individual: never thought about when it is present, the only thing in mind when it is absent. 21. Don't get caught up with what other people are doing. Being a contrarian isn't the key but being a crowd follower isn't either. You need to detach yourself emotionally. 22. For 240 years it's been a terrible mistake to bet against America, and now is no time to start. 23. I never attempt to make money on the stock market. I buy on the assumption that they could close the market the next day and not reopen it for five years. 24. I have no views as to where it (gold) will be, but the one thing I can tell you is it won't do anything between now and then except look at you. Whereas, you know, Coca-Cola will be making money, and I think Wells Fargo will be making a lot of money, and there will be a lot -- and it's a lot -- it's a lot better to have a goose that keeps laying eggs than a goose that just sits there and eats insurance and storage and a few things like that. 25. I just sit in my office and read all day. 26. I won't say if my candidate doesn't win, and probably half the time they haven't, I'm going to take my ball and go home 27. If returns are going to be 7 or 8 percent and you're paying 1 percent for fees, that makes an enormous difference in how much money you're going to have in retirement. 28. We want products where people feel like kissing you instead of slapping you. 29. If you aren't willing to own a stock for ten years, don't even think about owning it for ten minutes. 30. The most important investment you can make is one in yourself. 31. If you buy things you do not need, soon you will have to sell things you need. 32. If you don't feel comfortable making a rough estimate of the asset's future earnings, just forget it and move on. 33. If you like spending six to eight hours per week working on investments, do it. If you don't, then dollar-cost average into index funds. 34. If you're in the luckiest 1% of humanity, you owe it to the rest of humanity to think about the other 99%. 35. If you're smart, you're going to make a lot of money without borrowing. 36. In the 20th century, the United States endured two world wars and other traumatic and expensive military conflicts; the Depression; a dozen or so recessions and financial panics; oil shocks; a flu epidemic; and the resignation of a disgraced president. Yet the Dow rose from 66 to 11,497. 37. In the 54 years (Charlie Munger and I) have worked together, we have never forgone an attractive purchase because of the macro or political environment, or the views of other people. In fact, these subjects never come up when we make decisions 38. In the business world, the rearview mirror is always clearer than the windshield. 39. Investors should remember that excitement and expenses are their enemies. 40. It is a terrible mistake for investors with long-term horizons to measure their investment 'risk' by their portfolio's ratio of bonds to stocks. 41. It is not necessary to do extraordinary things to get extraordinary results. 42. It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently. 43. The one thing I will tell you is the worst investment you can have is cash. Everybody is talking about cash being king and all that sort of thing. Cash is going to become worth less over time. But good businesses are going to become worth more over time. 44. It's been an ideal period for investors: A climate of fear is their best friend. Those who invest only when commentators are upbeat end up paying a heavy price for meaningless reassurance. 45. It's better to hang out with people better than you. Pick out associates whose behavior is better than yours and you'll drift in that direction. 46. It's better to have a partial interest in the Hope diamond than to own all of a rhinestone. 47. It's far better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price than a fair company at a wonderful price. 48. Just pick a broad index like the S&P 500. Don't put your money in all at once; do it over a period of time. 49. Keep things simple and don't swing for the fences. When promised quick profits, respond with a quick "no”. 50. Lose money for the firm, and I will be understanding. Lose a shred of reputation for the firm, and I will be ruthless. 51. Many management teams are just deciding they're gonna buy X billions over X months. That's no way to buy things. You buy when selling for less than they are worth. ... It's not a complicated equation to figure out whether it is beneficial or not to repurchase shares. 52. The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything. 53. Most people get interested in stocks when everyone else is. The time to get interested is when no one else is. You can't buy what is popular and do well. 54. Never invest in a business you cannot understand. 55. Your premium brand had better be delivering something special, or it’s not going to get the business. 56. One can best prepare themselves for the economic future by investing in your own education. If you study hard and learn at a young age, you will be in the best circumstances to secure your future. 57. The most important thing to do if you find yourself in a hole is to stop digging. 58. One thing that could help would be to write down the reason you are buying a stock before your purchase. Write down "I am buying Microsoft at $300 billion because..." Force yourself to write this down. It clarifies your mind and discipline. 59. Only when the tide goes out do you discover who's been swimming naked. 60. Opportunities come infrequently. When it rains gold, put out the bucket, not the thimble. 61. Price is what you pay. Value is what you get. 62. Read 500 pages like this every day. That's how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest. All of you can do it, but I guarantee not many of you will do it. 63. Risk comes from not knowing what you're doing. 64. If a business does well, the stock eventually follows. 65. Since I know of no way to reliably predict market movements, I recommend that you purchase Berkshire shares only if you expect to hold them for at least five years. Those who seek short-term profits should look elsewhere. 66. Someone's sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago 67. The best thing that happens to us is when a great company gets into temporary trouble... We want to buy them when they're on the operating table. 68. Speculation is most dangerous when it looks easiest. 69. Stay away from it. It's a mirage, basically...The idea that it has some huge intrinsic value is a joke in my view. 70. The best chance to deploy capital is when things are going down. 71. The stock market is a no-called-strike game. You don't have to swing at everything -- you can wait for your pitch. 72. There is nothing wrong with a 'know nothing' investor who realizes it. The problem is when you are a 'know nothing' investor but you think you know something. 73. This does not bother Charlie and me. Indeed, we enjoy such price declines if we have funds available to increase our positions. 74. Too-big-to-fail is not a fallback position at Berkshire. Instead, we will always arrange our affairs so that any requirements for cash we may conceivably have will be dwarfed by our own liquidity. 75. There are all kinds of businesses that Charlie and I don’t understand, but that doesn’t cause us to stay up at night. It just means we go on to the next one, and that’s what the individual investor should do. 76. You can’t buy what is popular and do well. 77. We never want to count on the kindness of strangers in order to meet tomorrow's obligations. When forced to choose, I will not trade even a night's sleep for the chance of extra profits. 78. We will reject interesting opportunities rather than over-leverage our balance sheet. 79. We've long felt that the only value of stock forecasters is to make fortune tellers look good. Even now, Charlie and I continue to believe that short-term market forecasts are poison and should be kept locked up in a safe place, away from children and also from grown-ups who behave in the market like children. 80. What is smart at one price is stupid at another. 81. What we learn from history is that people don't learn from history. 82. When stock can be bought below a business's value it is probably the best use of cash. 83. When trillions of dollars are managed by Wall Streeters charging high fees, it will usually be the managers who reap outsized profits, not the clients. 84. When we own portions of outstanding businesses with outstanding managements, our favorite holding period is forever. 85. When you have able managers of high character running businesses about which they are passionate, you can have a dozen or more reporting to you and still have time for an afternoon nap. Conversely, if you have even one person reporting to you who is deceitful, inept or uninterested, you will find yourself with more than you can handle. 86. Whether we're talking about socks or stocks, I like buying quality merchandise when it is marked down. 87. Widespread fear is your friend as an investor because it serves up bargain purchases. 88. You are neither right nor wrong because the crowd disagrees with you. You are right because your data and reasoning are right. 89. You can't borrow money at 18 or 20 percent and come out ahead. 90. You can't produce a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant. 91. The most important quality for an investor is temperament, not intellect… You need a temperament that neither derives great pleasure from being with the crowd or against the crowd. 92. You don't need to be a rocket scientist. Investing is not a game where the guy with the 160 IQ beats the guy with 130 IQ. You only have to be able to evaluate companies within your circle of competence. 93. The size of your circle of competence is not very important; knowing its boundaries, however, is vital.
1:12:41

Warren Buffett turns 93 today! To celebrate, I'm sharing the greatest lecture he ever gave together with his 94 (!) best investment quotes. 1. Rule No. 1 is never lose money. Rule No. 2 is never forget Rule No. 1. 2. Diversification is a protection against ignorance. It makes very little sense for those who know what they're doing. 3. Do not take yearly results too seriously. Instead, focus on four or five-year averages. 4. All there is to investing is picking good stocks at good times and staying with them as long as they remain good companies. 5. American business - and consequently a basket of stocks - is virtually certain to be worth far more in the years ahead. 6. An investor should act as though he had a lifetime decision card with just twenty punches on it. 7. And so the important thing we do with managers, generally, is to find the .400 hitters and then not tell them how to swing. 8. The most important quality for an investor is temperament, not intellect. You need a temperament that neither derives great pleasure from being with the crowd or against the crowd. 9. Bitcoin has no unique value at all. 10. Buy a stock the way you would buy a house. Understand and like it such that you'd be content to own it in the absence of any market. 11. The years ahead will occasionally deliver major market declines - even panics - that will affect virtually all stocks. No one can tell you when these traumas will occur. 12. I insist on a lot of time being spent, almost every day, to just sit and think. That is very uncommon in American business. 13. Buy companies with strong histories of profitability and with a dominant business franchise. 14. For the investor, a too-high purchase price for the stock of an excellent company can undo the effects of a subsequent decade of favorable business developments. 15. I believe in giving my kids enough so they can do anything, but not so much that they can do nothing. 16. The world went mad. What we learn from history is that people don’t learn from history. 17. The key to investing is not assessing how much an industry is going to affect society, or how much it will grow, but rather determining the competitive advantage of any given company and, above all, the durability of that advantage. 18. Among the various propositions offered to you, if you invested in a very low cost index fund - where you don't put the money in at one time, but average in over 10 years - you'll do better than 90% of people who start investing at the same time. 19. Because if you're wrong and rates go to 2 percent, which I don't think they will, you pay it off. It's a one-way renegotiation. It is an incredibly attractive instrument for the homeowner and you've got a one-way bet. 20. Cash is to a business as oxygen is to an individual: never thought about when it is present, the only thing in mind when it is absent. 21. Don't get caught up with what other people are doing. Being a contrarian isn't the key but being a crowd follower isn't either. You need to detach yourself emotionally. 22. For 240 years it's been a terrible mistake to bet against America, and now is no time to start. 23. I never attempt to make money on the stock market. I buy on the assumption that they could close the market the next day and not reopen it for five years. 24. I have no views as to where it (gold) will be, but the one thing I can tell you is it won't do anything between now and then except look at you. Whereas, you know, Coca-Cola will be making money, and I think Wells Fargo will be making a lot of money, and there will be a lot -- and it's a lot -- it's a lot better to have a goose that keeps laying eggs than a goose that just sits there and eats insurance and storage and a few things like that. 25. I just sit in my office and read all day. 26. I won't say if my candidate doesn't win, and probably half the time they haven't, I'm going to take my ball and go home 27. If returns are going to be 7 or 8 percent and you're paying 1 percent for fees, that makes an enormous difference in how much money you're going to have in retirement. 28. We want products where people feel like kissing you instead of slapping you. 29. If you aren't willing to own a stock for ten years, don't even think about owning it for ten minutes. 30. The most important investment you can make is one in yourself. 31. If you buy things you do not need, soon you will have to sell things you need. 32. If you don't feel comfortable making a rough estimate of the asset's future earnings, just forget it and move on. 33. If you like spending six to eight hours per week working on investments, do it. If you don't, then dollar-cost average into index funds. 34. If you're in the luckiest 1% of humanity, you owe it to the rest of humanity to think about the other 99%. 35. If you're smart, you're going to make a lot of money without borrowing. 36. In the 20th century, the United States endured two world wars and other traumatic and expensive military conflicts; the Depression; a dozen or so recessions and financial panics; oil shocks; a flu epidemic; and the resignation of a disgraced president. Yet the Dow rose from 66 to 11,497. 37. In the 54 years (Charlie Munger and I) have worked together, we have never forgone an attractive purchase because of the macro or political environment, or the views of other people. In fact, these subjects never come up when we make decisions 38. In the business world, the rearview mirror is always clearer than the windshield. 39. Investors should remember that excitement and expenses are their enemies. 40. It is a terrible mistake for investors with long-term horizons to measure their investment 'risk' by their portfolio's ratio of bonds to stocks. 41. It is not necessary to do extraordinary things to get extraordinary results. 42. It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently. 43. The one thing I will tell you is the worst investment you can have is cash. Everybody is talking about cash being king and all that sort of thing. Cash is going to become worth less over time. But good businesses are going to become worth more over time. 44. It's been an ideal period for investors: A climate of fear is their best friend. Those who invest only when commentators are upbeat end up paying a heavy price for meaningless reassurance. 45. It's better to hang out with people better than you. Pick out associates whose behavior is better than yours and you'll drift in that direction. 46. It's better to have a partial interest in the Hope diamond than to own all of a rhinestone. 47. It's far better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price than a fair company at a wonderful price. 48. Just pick a broad index like the S&P 500. Don't put your money in all at once; do it over a period of time. 49. Keep things simple and don't swing for the fences. When promised quick profits, respond with a quick "no”. 50. Lose money for the firm, and I will be understanding. Lose a shred of reputation for the firm, and I will be ruthless. 51. Many management teams are just deciding they're gonna buy X billions over X months. That's no way to buy things. You buy when selling for less than they are worth. ... It's not a complicated equation to figure out whether it is beneficial or not to repurchase shares. 52. The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything. 53. Most people get interested in stocks when everyone else is. The time to get interested is when no one else is. You can't buy what is popular and do well. 54. Never invest in a business you cannot understand. 55. Your premium brand had better be delivering something special, or it’s not going to get the business. 56. One can best prepare themselves for the economic future by investing in your own education. If you study hard and learn at a young age, you will be in the best circumstances to secure your future. 57. The most important thing to do if you find yourself in a hole is to stop digging. 58. One thing that could help would be to write down the reason you are buying a stock before your purchase. Write down "I am buying Microsoft at $300 billion because..." Force yourself to write this down. It clarifies your mind and discipline. 59. Only when the tide goes out do you discover who's been swimming naked. 60. Opportunities come infrequently. When it rains gold, put out the bucket, not the thimble. 61. Price is what you pay. Value is what you get. 62. Read 500 pages like this every day. That's how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest. All of you can do it, but I guarantee not many of you will do it. 63. Risk comes from not knowing what you're doing. 64. If a business does well, the stock eventually follows. 65. Since I know of no way to reliably predict market movements, I recommend that you purchase Berkshire shares only if you expect to hold them for at least five years. Those who seek short-term profits should look elsewhere. 66. Someone's sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago 67. The best thing that happens to us is when a great company gets into temporary trouble... We want to buy them when they're on the operating table. 68. Speculation is most dangerous when it looks easiest. 69. Stay away from it. It's a mirage, basically...The idea that it has some huge intrinsic value is a joke in my view. 70. The best chance to deploy capital is when things are going down. 71. The stock market is a no-called-strike game. You don't have to swing at everything -- you can wait for your pitch. 72. There is nothing wrong with a 'know nothing' investor who realizes it. The problem is when you are a 'know nothing' investor but you think you know something. 73. This does not bother Charlie and me. Indeed, we enjoy such price declines if we have funds available to increase our positions. 74. Too-big-to-fail is not a fallback position at Berkshire. Instead, we will always arrange our affairs so that any requirements for cash we may conceivably have will be dwarfed by our own liquidity. 75. There are all kinds of businesses that Charlie and I don’t understand, but that doesn’t cause us to stay up at night. It just means we go on to the next one, and that’s what the individual investor should do. 76. You can’t buy what is popular and do well. 77. We never want to count on the kindness of strangers in order to meet tomorrow's obligations. When forced to choose, I will not trade even a night's sleep for the chance of extra profits. 78. We will reject interesting opportunities rather than over-leverage our balance sheet. 79. We've long felt that the only value of stock forecasters is to make fortune tellers look good. Even now, Charlie and I continue to believe that short-term market forecasts are poison and should be kept locked up in a safe place, away from children and also from grown-ups who behave in the market like children. 80. What is smart at one price is stupid at another. 81. What we learn from history is that people don't learn from history. 82. When stock can be bought below a business's value it is probably the best use of cash. 83. When trillions of dollars are managed by Wall Streeters charging high fees, it will usually be the managers who reap outsized profits, not the clients. 84. When we own portions of outstanding businesses with outstanding managements, our favorite holding period is forever. 85. When you have able managers of high character running businesses about which they are passionate, you can have a dozen or more reporting to you and still have time for an afternoon nap. Conversely, if you have even one person reporting to you who is deceitful, inept or uninterested, you will find yourself with more than you can handle. 86. Whether we're talking about socks or stocks, I like buying quality merchandise when it is marked down. 87. Widespread fear is your friend as an investor because it serves up bargain purchases. 88. You are neither right nor wrong because the crowd disagrees with you. You are right because your data and reasoning are right. 89. You can't borrow money at 18 or 20 percent and come out ahead. 90. You can't produce a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant. 91. The most important quality for an investor is temperament, not intellect… You need a temperament that neither derives great pleasure from being with the crowd or against the crowd. 92. You don't need to be a rocket scientist. Investing is not a game where the guy with the 160 IQ beats the guy with 130 IQ. You only have to be able to evaluate companies within your circle of competence. 93. The size of your circle of competence is not very important; knowing its boundaries, however, is vital.

Compounding Quality

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